Title: Gold Rush (ゴールドラッシュ)
Author: Miri Yu
Year: 1998
Plot Summary: 14-year old Kazuki is disturbed by his surroundings, growing up in the depraved town of Kogane-cho, which is filled with prostitutes, gang members, and people stuck in this place of moral decay. The novel follows the unraveling of Kazuki’s mind as he struggles in an ambiguous place between child- and adulthood.

My thoughts: Using excessive violence as an outlet to right what is wrong in Kazuki’s mind, this novel is disturbingly real and graphic in depictions of gore. I don’t know which is more unsettling–the horrifyingly detailed descriptions of Kazuki’s violent outbursts, or that the thought process that follows the outbursts is often logical and almost understandable.

This novel plays out not unlike a Murakami Ryu book, whose stories are often uncomfortable to read and interchanges between surreal events and reality. Kazuki is obviously disturbed, having to grow up in a house with domestic violence and in a town where he has no adult role model, where his group of friends gang rape and do drugs, and his older sister Miho sells sex to older men. The irony in his criticism of the immorality of his hometown and the depravity of his actions he takes to rectify the wrongs is pointed out over and over again.

Since this novel was inspired by a real-life event of a student murdering another student, I am going to take a stab and guess that Miri Yu is trying to make readers question the line drawn between child and adulthood. Kazuki is constantly being oppressed by his young age, no matter how gruesome the acts he commits, and never taken seriously by the adult figures in his life, who only try to take advantage of him as the heir to a large pachinko parlor. Kazuki’s older mentally handicapped brother, Kouki, is the only figure truly innocent in the book, who can perhaps represent childlike actions and wonder that Kazuki knows nothing of, despite being the younger brother.

Despite the intensity of the novel, I think Miri Yu hit home all the points she aimed to make in regards to children growing up too fast. There were many parts in this novel that made me lose all appetite, sometimes even feeling nauseous (if you want a clue, one such scene involves a golf-club and show dog.) But overall I think it sought to perturb readers, and not many novels can get you feeling quite as perturbed as Gold Rush.

I recommend this book for those interested in social issues with a stomach for hyper violence. Definitely not recommended for those who enjoy light reading.

Excerpt:

He stood on the bed and looked around the room, inspecting it carefully for any sign. Then he closed his eyes and wished that none of it had ever happened. When he slowly opened them again, his eyes fell on the center of the Persian rug where the pattern seemed to be wriggling like a knot of snakes. As he watched, the rug seemed to bulge from the floor, buoyed up by the stench of death rising beneath it. Shaking the vision from his head, Kazuki thought of filling the vault with concrete and covering it with a wood floor; but, realizing that would involve having workers in the basement, her gave up on the idea. He got down on his hands and knees like a dog and crawled around sniffing at the rug. A horrible stench–blood or vomit, he couldn’t be sure which–made him turn away. His knees and hands suddenly felt damp, and when he lifted them to look, they were stained red.

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