Piercing by Ryū Murakami
Published 1994 · 52,800 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is Piercing to read?
Piercing scores 53 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: 45 out of 100
- Plain Japanese, plainly translated.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Short, clinical sentences.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete violence with psychological framing.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Light; a novella.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Two damaged people, each narrating a plan the other cannot see.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The ice pick and the hotel room carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Distance between their rehearsed plans and what happens.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- It ends mid-encounter.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Alternating interiors.
How Piercing is regarded
Piercing holds a literary regard score of 46 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.