Coin Locker Babies by Ryū Murakami
Published 1980 · 393 pages · 140,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Dystopian Fiction, Transgressive Fiction
How hard is Coin Locker Babies to read?
Coin Locker Babies scores 61 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Snyder's translation is fast and colloquial, with drug, medical and chemical-weapons vocabulary and a great deal of Tokyo subcultural slang.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- Propulsive, unornamented sentences with heavy dialogue, written for momentum rather than for difficulty.
- Abstraction: 54 out of 100
- Physically relentless and concrete, though the whole novel is organised around an abstract proposition about the heartbeat, abandonment and what a person does with unusable rage.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Two life stories across twenty years, an invented Tokyo geography, and a plot involving buried chemical weapons, pop-music economics and pole-vault training.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Third-person narration that moves between two brothers and several others, with long hallucinatory stretches in which what is happening and what is imagined are not distinguished.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The lockers, the recorded heartbeat, the crocodile, Toxitown, the datura and the destroyed city are worked continuously as a single figure about being discarded.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- A pop star manufactured out of the trauma the novel is describing, sold back to the country that produced it, with the media apparatus rendered as flat comedy against genuine horror.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- The novel ends with the weapon released over Tokyo and the outcome unresolved for both brothers, refusing to say whether the destruction is catastrophe or the freedom they were after.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Parallel tracking of two lives across two decades, with an invented city zone, hallucination sequences and a shift into thriller structure in the final third.
How Coin Locker Babies is regarded
Coin Locker Babies holds a literary regard score of 63 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.