Audition

Rating: 2.5/5 Films That Never Get Made

Couples meet in a variety of ways: at work, through mutual friends, and on dating apps. But the most successful way to meet your soulmate is to set up auditions for a film that will never get made and pick the hottest applicant. (What, like your love life is perfect?) That last meet cute is what happens in Audition by Ryu Murakami.

Aoyama, a widower, is encouraged by his son to find a wife. Aoyama’s filmmaker friend suggests hosting auditions for a film that will never be made. Aoyama can’t get one applicant, Yamasaki Asami, out of his mind. On paper she is perfect, and she’s completely captivating in person.

But she has a mysterious past. Some things she’s said about her life turn out to be untrue, but Aoyama’s rose-colored glasses prevent him from seeing the red flags, and it may be too late.

Audition is an interesting story, but it’s lacking backstory. We eventually learn a bit more about Yamasaki’s past, but we don’t learn about why she does what she does. (We don’t need a full biography, but something simple like how Halloween tells us about Michael Myers would’ve been great.)

It is a short book, but not much happens for the first ¾ of the book. The end picks up much more and is full of the gory scenes we all love, but it is a very slow burn. Additionally, the characters don’t have much depth. We don’t get to see much about the personalities of Aoyama, his son, or Yamasaki. It is a short book, but readers aren’t able to classify any characters in any meaningful way, e.g., Aoyama is lazy or Yamasaki would do anything for a good corndog.

Because of this lack of character depth, there was no one to root for, making it hard to get invested in the story. Aoyama came up with a weird way to find a wife and seemed to mostly be after Yamasaki’s looks, so I didn’t really care if anything bad happened to him. And Yamasaki remained a strange and mysterious person, so it’s hard to know why she does the strange things she does. (That said, I usually root for women, so I guess I’m Team Yamasaki.)

Audition was originally published in Japanese, and I read an English translation. Perhaps it’s the translation, but much of the foreshadowing felt clunky. It became pretty clear early on what Yamasaki might be up to, and it was also obvious that certain props would be crucial to the plot.

While the concept of this story is interesting and the ending of the book is violent and gross in all the right ways, the characters fell flat and the exposition dragged. But if you’re looking for a quick read that will gross you out, check out Audition. It won’t make you view life from a new perspective or change the way you think, but it might scratch that itch for gore.