Ryu Murakami, the Japanese novelist and filmmaker known for treating serious societal issues such as violence and drugs with his unique brand of cynical humour, has passed away. He was 74.His publisher, Gentosha, confirmed his death on Friday, October 23. Calling his death premature, Gentosha said Ryu Murakami spent his “career continuously releasing shocking works meant for a younger audience.” His English-language publisher, Pushkin Press, also expressed its sympathies.Born Ryūnosuke Murakami on February 19, 1952, in Nagasaki, he was a politically conscientious high schooler who participated in a rooftop protest in 1969 against the arrival of the US Navy warship USS Enterprise and the heavy US military presence in Japan, which led to his suspension and a three-month house arrest. During this time, he encountered hippie culture for the first time. These experiences formed the basis of his semi-autobiographical novel 69.His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue (1976), written while he was a student at Musashino Art University, depicted disaffected youths adrift in drugs and decadence. Despite objections, it won both the 19th Gunzo New Writers’ Award and the 75th Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary honour. The book went on to become a bestseller, selling 3.5 million copies in hardcover and paperback, Jiji Press reported.Also Read | Orhan Pamuk, Elena Ferrante, Kazuo Ishiguro: Who is the Italian hoaxer who keeps declaring writers deadCoin Locker Babies (1980), about two boys abandoned as infants in station lockers, cemented his reputation among Japanese punks and alienated young readers. It was followed by the autobiographical 69 and the alternate-history The World in Five Minutes From Now (1994).His thriller, The Miso Soup (1997), about a guide escorting an American serial killer through Tokyo’s Kabukicho red-light district, won him the Yomiuri Literary Prize; Parasites (2000) won the Tanizaki Prize; and From the Fatherland, with Love (2005), which imagines a North Korean invasion of Japan’s Fukuoka, won him the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award.Novelist, director, broadcasterRyu Murakami also directed adaptations of his own work such as Tokyo Decadence (1992). The director Takashi Miike adapted Ryu Murakami’s 1997 novel Audition into the 1999 horror film of the same name, which became an international cult hit. Hideaki Anno directed Love & Pop, based on Ryu Murakami’s novel.Story continues below this adHe also founded the e-magazine Japan Mail Media in 1999, wrote the bestselling career guide for young people 13-sai no Hello Work, and spent two decades as the chief interviewer on TV Tokyo’s business programme Cambrian Palace.A critic of modern JapanRyu Murakami’s violence has been read as a social diagnosis delving into taboo subjects such as domestic violence, school refusal, “compensated dating” and hikikomori (prolonged social withdrawal), attributing them to Japan’s postwar modernisation project.Critics have argued that his 1990s novels turned to apocalyptic fantasy as a way of imagining society starting over during Japan’s “Lost Decade,” and that Murakami’s female antagonists predicate their violence on their femininity rather than despite it, subverting male-coded violence against female victims, especially in Audition.