Miike gained a lot from elegantly wrought source material – but the book is now in danger of seeming like a draft, or even a screen treatment.

"[1] Kasia Boddy praised the novel in The Telegraph, stating that Murakami "allows author and reader to have it both ways, simultaneously indulging a taste for schlock and some low-level guilt about "objectification".

[2] Nathan Rabin of Artforum opined: "Audition depends less on the bracing nastiness of its final twist than on the skillful interplay of the horrific and the mundane" and that "Murakami is not a subtle writer.

He lays out the freshman-level psychology behind Asami's actions with all the ham-fisted literalness of the psychiatrist explaining how poor Norman Bates went a little batty after murdering his mother and her lover in Psycho.

But if Audition skirts sexism, it's still enormously savvy about the roles class, age, social status, and gender play in romantic relationships, as well as about the queasy voyeurism and exploitation endemic to the entertainment industry.