Customer Reviews

Grotesque

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I attended a Natsuo Kirino reading and was disappointed to learn that in the American translation of this book, the ending had been altered. There is no indication of this in the book; there is no way to know this without comparing it to the Japanese edition (unfortunately, I can't read Japanese). Having the piece of information they omitted makes you better understand the actions of the protagonist at the end of the book. (There's also a puzzling double standard -- in the book, a female character engages in underage prostitution, but they cut the part where a male character does the same thing.) Knopf really dropped the ball on this and I hope that future works by this author are released uncut by a more courageous publisher.

What a shame that this is only the second of Kirino's novels to be translated into English. I anxiously await more, as Grotesque proved to be the most psychologically intense piece of fiction I have ever read. This story of a hate-consumed woman, her younger sister, and a classmate is riddled with the concept of human beings as monsters, and with the role of females in a society that devalues them at every turn. No short review could do this brilliant book justice. Kirino's talent is so huge it is scary. One of the best of 2007, without a doubt.

Readers seeking a murder mystery will be disappointed by this novel. The whodunit is almost irrelevant to the story. What Grotesque is, is a powerful and stunning exploration of the effects of a society that condemns and restricts women based upon looks and expectations. Told from four first-person perspectives, Kirino effectively portrays people crushed by the cultural and societal limits, destroyed by the resulting emptiness of their lives. While the narratives vary in quality, likely a function of translation, this is a compelling and ultimately stunning psychological novel.

The Japanese describe their own culture by saying, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down," and that aphorism forms the underpinning of this consummately Japanese novel. The four speakers of the novel, three of them women and one of them a foreign-born man, are all "nails" that "stick up" in Tokyo. They need to be recognized for who they are, but they have failed to find even minimal success in the culture in which they live and work. For the women, there's an additional barrier to personal happiness--"Women are merely commodities for men to possess." To be successful in this world, a woman needs to be cooperative and submissive.

Two of the "nails" trying to avoid being "hammered down" in this odd but fascinating novel are prostitutes. Another is the pathologically jealous older sister of one of the prostitutes, and one is an illegal Chinese national who murdered one or both of the prostitutes--not the typical cast of characters for a novel written by a Japanese author and published for an English-speaking audience. Revealing aspects of Japanese society usually kept hidden, the novel is told by characters who feel they have little to lose, and it is dark, often raw, and sometimes sexually explicit.

The four characters tell their own stories, leading up to the murders of the two prostitutes and their immediate aftermath--the trial of the murderer. An unnamed speaker, the studious sister of "diabolically beautiful" prostitute Yuriko Hirata, describes her own efforts to succeed in school. Her inability to form friendships, her pathological hatred for her sister, and her resentment of students whose success at the school is far greater than her own, make her a frustrating and unlikable main character. Her sister, Yuriko, the next speaker, describes how she became a prostitute as a schoolgirl, and how she has used her beauty for her own ends.

Zhang, the next speaker, admits that he killed Yuriko Hirata, and describes the poverty-stricken life he led in rural China, where his family lived in a cave. The reader develops some admiration for his determination and resourcefulness, even as he is telling about his crimes, before and after he reached Japan illegally. The final speaker is Kazue Sato, the second prostitute, and (to me) the most interesting character in the novel. An extremely hard worker, she has graduated from an "elite" university, and gained a full-time job at a "high-ranked" business, yet the reader empathizes when she turns to prostitution.

Kirino's insights into the psyches of these characters, combined with her analysis of her own culture, create an unusual novel, hard to put down. Some aspects are a bit awkward and the novel would have benefited from pruning, but the novel provides a rare look at some of the less attractive aspects of this traditional culture and its people, and its detailed inside views of family, school, and employment are unforgettable. n Mary Whipple

(3.75) The other reviews can reveal what this book is about. What I wanted to share is the extreme responses this book incited in my boyfriend and me. He alternately found himself loving the narrator, Yuriko's sister, for her brutal honesty and hating her for her malice and psychological bullying of Kazue. Meanwhile, I found myself rooting the narrator on as she spoke the cruel truth about the pitiful hopelessness of Kazue's meritocratic dreams, but a moment later I wondered if that made me a bully myself or as bitter and heartless as the narrator. Perhaps it reminded me too much of what I had seen growing up to shock me.

Then, there was the simultaneous hilarity and pain of Kazue's cluelessness. Was she a tragic figure, blind, or both? I admired Kirino for inspiring me to feel so much for her characters, even for Yuriko, who is certainly not the ditsy airhead her older sister wants us to believe she is (I also found it hard to believ she was as ghastly as she considered herself in her 30s: is it just because women past 25 in Japan are regarded as Christmas cake, as a friend from Japan says?).

My attention was quite strained by Zhang's tale of Chinese hardship (it seemed the wrong book to educate the reader about how difficult it is for immigrants in Japan), but I immediately forgave Kirino when Yuriko's older sister admitted herself Zhang's account was tedious and could be skipped (I'd recommend others to skim it as well).

Again, my patience was tested by Kazue's journal: I just kept on thinking, aren't you ready to die yet? But I see this was intentional on Kirino's part, to make the reader struggle between our (or my) wanting Kazue to just give up on life and our feeling ashamed for our coldness and complicity in her bullying. It also made my boyfriend and me think concurrently of the people we loved in our own lives who were heading towards the same fate as Kazue and Yuriko, not through prostitution but through drugs.

What did disappoint me in the end was the last chapter, which seemed a cop-out. If only an editor had suggested it was unconvincing and encouraged her that an alternative, though more shocking, would be more in line with the narrator's character, but that is wishful thinking on my part. When I give this book to others, which I will, I will make sure to discuss with them, when they've finished, what they thought of the ending.

This book could have been edited down a hundred pages (back when it was written in Japanese), but for what it did offer, I have no regrets for its consuming my attention entirely and will always look forward to further translations of Kirino's books. This book may not be the masterpiece "Out" was, but for anyone who has gone to an elite school on scholarship, striven to remain a petite zero, wanted to excel while recognizing how off-the-mark our values of judgment are, or wondered just how much her body could be worth, reading "Grotesque" is just as powerful an experience as reading "Out" was.

Although Natsuo Kirino has published sixteen books in Japan, GROTESQUE is only her second to be translated into English, following her successful first entry, OUT. Ms. Kirino's work is typically categorized as mystery novels, a genre of which I am neither a fan nor a reader. However, I happily make an exception in Ms. Kirino's case, having earlier stumbled across OUT while looking for English language books in China. Her work tacks hard toward exploration of human (especially female) psyches within the rigid cultural framework that is Japan. As a result, her two books stand as critiques of Japanese society and culture, set within a fictional framework and centered on acts of homicidal violence either conducted by women in OUT, or directed at women in GROTESQUE.

At its core, GROTESQUE is a simple tale of the brutal murders of two middle-aged prostitutes, occurring slightly less than a year apart, and the man accused of killing them both. However, rather than spend most of her 467 pages on the crime or its investigation (Zhang, the accused, freely admits to murdering Yuriko), Ms. Kirino creates a complex web of characters while recounting the school-age experiences of both victims as seen through one of the victim's sisters and as recounted by journals kept by both dead women. The story passes back and forth from the present (the killer's trial) to the victims' high school days in the high pressure and high conformist Japanese school system, while a parallel thread tracks the killler's passage from poor farm villager in China to Chinese immigrant laborer in Tokyo.

The unifying character in GROTESQUE is Ms. Hirata, unattractive older sister to the almost preternaturally beautiful Yuriko Hirata. Both girls were born of the same Swiss Caucasian father and Japanese mother, but where the elder sister looks like her frumpy mother, Yuriko represents in stunning fashion the "Eurasian ideal." Ms. Hirata chafes at what she believes are the inevitable debasing comparisons between herself and her sister Yuriko, becoming so resentful that she seeks to distance herself as far as possible from the princess-like Yuriko. The elder sister studies relentlessly, hoping to supplant her younger sibling's physical but empty-headed beauty with her own academic accomplishments, culminating with admission to the esteemed Q High School for Young Women and later to Q University. When her family, including Yuriko, moves to Switzerland without her (she stays behind to attend Q School and live with her incipiently senile, bonsai-growing grandfather), Ms. Hirata appears to have both her distance and her secret wish. However, her father's divorce and rapid remarriage to a much younger Turkish woman leads Yuriko to return to Japan where, lo and behold, she is accepted into the trendy, ultra chic Q School entirely based on her extraordinary beauty.

The appropriately unnamed Ms. Hirata -- who would remember her name with Yuriko in the room? -- passes successfully, academically speaking, but friendless through the unforgiving, classist world of Q School. At the telling of her story, Ms. Hirata is thirty-nine and still a virgin. She has become a fish made so cold from hating her sister that she feels completely indifferent to her mother's death by suicide and her grandfather's senility. In her tale, Ms. Hirata describes other young women from Q School, including the hopeless social striver Kazue Sato and the top-achieving Matsuru. The passage of time reveals, however, that Kazue mixes her professional career with nighttime rounds of prostitution, and Matsuru is brainwashed into a death-dealing cult. Ms. Hirata moves through life alone and emotionally frigid until she meets Yurio, Yuriko's equally beautiful son who happens to have been blind from birth (and symbolically blind to the meaning of physical beauty). His love of music and desire for a computer to write music leads Ms. Hirata to contemplate the same possibilities for which she reviled Kazue and Yuriko.

As she did in OUT, Kirino draws in GROTESQUE a startlingly unappealing picture of Japanese society, from its schools to its professional world to its treatment of women and outsiders. At the same time, she creates sibling rivalries and relationships that nearly all end tragically, marred by incestual feelings, competitive dislike, or simple mutual loathing. Individuals and family structures both wilt under Ms. Kirino's gaze, likely leaving the Western reader grateful that he or she was not born to Japanese parents. Men, whether Japanese or Westerner, do little better than women, the former gender being viewed mostly as lascivious morons too timid to act on their Lolita complexes and too weak to cope with the consequences when they do.

GROTESQUE is a dark but fascinating tale. Along with OUT, Natsuo Kirino opens some disturbing windows into a closed society few Westerners can ever hope to comprehend. Kirino's stories are compelling, her characters raw, and her psychological explorations into the dark recesses of human behavior disquieting. Combined, these characteristics make her two books intriguing, first-rate reads.

As the title indicates, Grotesque is not a light, breezy, romantic fantasy. It deals with a group of people in contemporary Japan who are full of anger and frustration. They harbor dark thoughts and frequently act upon them. There is very little warmth and kindness in the 530 pages. The only somewhat kind person I found is Kazue, also, I must note, a world-class moonlighter. Kazue is very passive, and there are many sharks in her world who devour kindness/passivity.
The characters often lie, plot revenge, manipulate, and scoff at any notion of morality. They are also crushingly materialistic. It's all about the yen in this book. (There's a dollar/yen conversion chart in the front.)
I started reading Grotesque because I enjoyed Out. The first two hundred or so pages suffer from disorganization and rambling. But eventually the powerful writing of Natsuo Kirino kicks in, and the second half of the book kept me aboard, although I did contemplate abandoning ship.
The topics examined as the stories unravel include people who don't physically resemble their parents, the Japanese educational system, gender discrimination, prostitution, and illegal Chinese immigrants living in Japan. Kirino puts her spin on these topics, usually from the perspective of women who are very unhappy campers. The main narrator is the unnamed cunning older sister of the beautiful Yuriko. All in all, it's a good read.

It can't be compared with Out, Kirino's masterpiece. It reads like a first draft, with long drawn out explanations, much too much about Japanese girls' schools, and completely uninspired descriptions. The chapters are narrated by different characters, all about equally dull.

I read and loved OUT by Natsuo Kirino, so I felt like it was only natural for me to run out and buy GROTESQUE. I was not disappointed in any way--this reading experience has been both dark and illuminating. Each character (Yuriko, Miss Hirata, Kazue, and Zhang) has a different sort of struggle and a different sort of perversion, and yet they are connected by the fact that they are all outsiders, prostituting themselves in one way or another. In many ways I felt that I knew these characters, especially Kazue, whose harrowing experiences are at once completely beyond anything I have ever experienced and, strangely, very familiar. I certainly don't think this book is meant to be enjoyed by everyone, but I would recommend it all the same, if only for people to get a sense of what the men and women who have "slipped through the cracks" must endure, especially in a country like Japan, which values homogeneousness.

My main issue with this book is: it's been CENSORED. I can't say how angry I was when I found this out--after slogging through over 500 pages of material, I found out that a portion at the end has been cut out. WHY? This book is absolutely teeming with difficult, ugly images--and GOOD, because that's what makes it compelling. Part of this book's fundamental appeal is that it explores the rejected underbelly of Japanese society, and yet the publisher decided that it would be best to clean it up and cut out portions so as not to offend American sensibilities. Cowards. How shameful. I feel like I've been ripped off.

From what I understand, the part in question dealt with the prostitution of underage males. I don't know anything more than that.

Kirino is one of my favorite authors. I know that GROTESQUE was censored because marketers wanted it to have a broader appeal, but... seriously, what a waste.

This book gives me mixed feelings.

Honestly, I struggled through the first 120 pages or so. The narration in these beginning chapters is absolutely stale. I was convinced that I COULDN'T be reading a book by Natsuo Kirino, even if it was an English translation! Out had been full of delicious narration, but this book's narrator had no flavor at all. I had to force myself to read that far, convinced that it HAD to pick up sooner or later, but another book caught my I and and Grotesque lay unread for several months before I picked it up again out of complete utter boredom.

Shockingly, the page I had stopped reading on began the most intriguing parts of the book: The tales of Q high school and the unnamed narrator's "blissful" (however dreary it would be to a normal person) world falling apart on account of, in her words, her monster sister.

The remainder of the book had a few pitfalls (the courtroom report of the suspected killer's activities - dull, although courtroom documents aren't known for their creative language) but I couldn't put it down when it got exciting.

Beauty, prostitution, self loathing, men, women, and sex -- all aspects of the seedy darkness that exists in human beings are indulged in throughout this book.


Although I can't comment on censorship -- I wasn't aware of it -- I can sympathize with those that compare this book with Out. I picked up Out when I had a gift card and the bold cover forced me into an impulse buy... I normally hate crime and mystery, but Out sucked me in immedietely and I read through it without leaving my seat.

Grotesque starts VERY slowly (I kept asking: why do I want to know more about this story? until I had gotten about 120 pages into the book.) and at times the first-person narration gets a little dull, but the character shifts kept me alert and excited to turn the page. I found myself biting my nails, yelling at the pages, and forcing myself to stop reading to build up on the already mounting suspense and shock. It's on a different level than Out... more character-driven than action and mystery driven, it's a novel that is definately worth picking up for those rainy days alone. But be prepared to dredge through the first 100 pages or so... :P