Imagine something. Is that too much to ask? It won’t take much effort, and when it really starts happening you won’t have to imagine any more.

Around 2020, a disease expresses itself in the human population. A very embarrassing and serious disease. It has some clinical name, but everyone on the street calls it “well, you know…that.”

It only affects men. The symptoms are a pretty quick death.

Maybe we can identify the pathogen responsible. Maybe it’s something too synergistic and vague to nail down – a complex multi-stage infection caused by the interaction of multiple benign bacteria.

But one thing’s clear: it’s universal, and it’s incubating in anyone. There’s nowhere to quarantine so it won’t get out, and nowhere to quarantine to stop it from getting in.

But one group is spared: gay men.

To be more exact, men who have been sodomised.

This disturbing fact provokes the kind of consternation-fuelled investigation where you can almost imagine sweat dripping off the researchers’ fingers. Yes, it’s true. If you’ve taken it up the ass, you will not get the disease.

Ipso facto, if you do not wish to get the disease, you must take it up the ass.

We try to find a more…dignified way of conferring protection, but no dice. Artificially douching your colon with a man’s semen doesn’t work. Likewise, anal penetration is not the trigger. Those who practice “pegging” are dying at the same rate as everyone else. You have to actually have a gay man ejaculate into your asshole if you want to stay alive. Why? How does this work?

Good question, but until we figure it out…how badly do you want to live?

Society now looks quite a bit different.

The gay bathhouses of the 1960s are reopened, and become filled with men with shivering hands, thousand-yard stares, and evasive speech.

Fashion designers, architects, and artists have an excellent survival rate. The theme of the age for doctoral theses becomes something like “Anal Lube Hermeneutics – Towards an Understanding of Post-Plague Survivor’s Guilt Through the Work of Foucault.”

Members of the clergy and mullahs survive at far higher rates than average. They credit spiritual benediction and prayer for their survival.

The incumbent President of the United States – a family-values Baptist from Alabama – makes the controversial decision to have gay sex and save his own life. Everything’s handled with the utmost discretion, but unfortunately the gay “donor” had a tiny spycam in his pubic hair. The video is sold to the Daily Mail for a record-setting eighty million dollars.

Mostly, things become very, very awkward.

You’ll be meet a well-dressed businessman in Fleet Street or New York, shake his hand, and then break off eye contact as soon as possible. You’ll both be thinking the same thing. Very recently, perhaps only yesterday, you had another man on your back. And his balls were touching yours. Anyway, what’s the Stockholm Securities Exchange doing?

And there’s always troubling warnings from the CDC and NIH labs. The plague is mutating, evolving. Who knows if gay sex will still be enough to confer protection tomorrow. Sometime soon, dog semen might be the cure. Or dolphin semen. Whatever. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it – perhaps literally.

Can we have a moment of silence for all the fairytales disemboweled by their authors’ insistence that they have a moral message?

The Narnia stories are some of the best/worst out there. Ambivalent? Yes/no. Sometimes, CS Lewis’s imagination takes flight, and Narnia becomes a place of haunted splendor. Other times, Narnia is shallow and facile, with characters in constant danger of puncturing their paper-thin world with an errant swordpoint. CS Lewis keeps using them as a delivery vehicle for his moral views. His fairytale world seems fabricated and unconvincing when you realise that the fauns and centaurs are there to preach the views of a 20th century English professor.

Why does Edmund Pevensie have to die?

What crime has he committed? The word “traitor” is bandied about…who did he betray? He was not a citizen of Narnia. He swore no oath of fealty to Aslan. From his perspective, he met a nice lady who promised to do nice things for his family, so he’s throwing his lot in with her. Sounds fair. Is his crime that he was gullible, easily mislead? For fuck’s sake, he’s a young boy, talking to the embodiment of the devil. She could probably convince Henry Kissinger to eat the turkish delight.

Roger Ebert once said “You can’t have heroes and villains when the wrong side is making the best sense.” And it’s hard to view Edmund as a bad person when he’s only doing the things you and I would do, in his place.

Yes, he meets some other characters who speak ill of the witch, but who doesn’t spread rumours about their enemy during a war? What reason does he have to believe the beavers’ and Tumnus’s version of events, instead of Maugrim’s and the dwarf’s?

It gets worse when you consider that the witch’s turkish delight is described as enchanted: you will always want to eat more of it. All of Edmund’s decisions after meeting the witch were made with highly impaired judgement. How does it make sense to treat him as a bad guy, either from the reader’s point of view or from Aslan’s?

CS Lewis is trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents here, and it’s a problem he never manages to solve. You can actually see the exact moment when he gives up, and just declares ex cathedra that Edmund knew he was joining the side of evil.

“She was jolly nice to me, anyway, much nicer than they are. I expect she is the rightful Queen really. Anyway, she’ll be better than that awful Aslan!” At least, that was the excuse he made in his own mind for what he was doing. It wasn’t a very good excuse, however, for deep down inside him he really knew that the White Witch was bad and cruel. ”

This is shitty writing, and you can almost hear pipes and water mains burst inside the story. You can’t just declare by fiat “this character is evil”, you have to let their actions earn it. Edmund’s don’t. He’s a villain with no villainous acts, a guy on a wanted poster with his crimes reading “he was mean to his sister.”

But the Chronicles of Narnia are still great books, or at least fun books. You just have to indulge CS Lewis a bit. They’re like Saturday morning cartoons where every now and then the super hero jabs a finger at you through the screen and delivers a PSA about saying no to drugs and staying in school. Although in Narnia’s case it’s often more like saying no to school and staying in drugs.

In the Miso Soup has been called many things, most of them not true. You’ll hear it called, over and over, “The Japanese [Something]”. The Japanese Silence of the Lambs. The Japanese American Psycho (hey, I can grok it). Et cetera. None hit really close to the truth, which is fitting, because the novel’s about looking the other way, and deliberately missing the point.

The story isn’t much. It’s barely even a story. Kenji is a sex tourism guide for thrill-seeking gaijin, and he ends up working for a genuinely odd duck called Frank, an American who claims to be missing a section of his brain, and who might just be the serial killer stalking Shinjuku. Kenji and the rest of the story’s characters (including his girlfriend Jun) struggle to be two dimensional, and mostly exist as sounding boards and emotional foils for Frank, who carries the bulk of the story.

Frank’s a kind of prism through which we see the various contradictory aspects of Japanese society. Prudish, conservative…but you’d never see groups of schoolgirls selling sex to middle aged men in the United States. The idea that Japan embodies “too much, yet too little” has been done before, but Murakami bulldozes it into your head. Frank’s behavior seems abhorrent, but it doesn’t seem implausible that he’d go to Japan to commit these acts, rather than another country. Frank and Japan seem to fit together, in a weird way.

In the Miso Soup plays pretty loose ball with conventions on how to structure a novel. The big climax hits exactly halfway through, and much of the rest of novel is spent in incessant talkiness. Western gore porn novels make a mess and then fade to black. This novel deigns to show the emotional clean-up process afterwards, as well. There’s long periods of didacticism: at a certain point comparisons to Sade seem apt, as Murakami virtually forgets he’s telling a story and just directly reads you the riot act on some philosophical ideas for a page or two.

But the ideas are all compelling and heartfelt ones. Like the more famous Murakami, sometimes you can’t discern what his exact point is, but you can tell there always is one.

Props are due to translator Ralph F. McCarthy, who avoids the tin-eared “upmarket Babelfish” tone Japanese to English novels can sometimes have, and makes the prose eerie, uneasy, and alive. In his hands, Murakami’s version Shinjuku becomes a neon-lit abattoir that disturbs, unsettles, and most of all, convinces. Sometimes Japanese novels hold English readers at arms length because of the translation. Here, it doesn’t, no matter how much you might wish it so.

It’s not especially similar to any Western novel I can recall reading. At certain points, it’s even hard to tell if you’re having a good time. But if you want a compelling journey through the grease-traps of Japanese society, Murakami’s work is very thick soup indeed.