Customer Reviews

Innocent World

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Ami seems to have a good life. The daughter of successful parents, she is given everything that she wants. Yet there appears to be something missing because when the opportunity arises that she can make lots of extra money from being an underage prostitute she jumps at it. However, the men she sleeps with offer her little solace so she oftentimes separates her mind from her body while the men, normally middle-aged businessmen have their way with her. The only person with whom she can receive true sexual satisfaction from is her mentally handicapped older brother.

Ami and her brother continue to have sex with each other under their parents' roof until they are discovered. Takuya, her older brother is forced to move to his aunt's home in Yokohama, but Ami only increases the number of clients she sleeps with in order to make enough money to visit her older brother. Ami considers Takuya to be the only person with whom she can truly find satisfaction; not only in a sexual way, but on a spiritual level as well. However, when she becomes pregnant with her brother's baby, Ami is left to decide on her own whether or not to keep the child.

I purchased this book a few months ago because Vertical Books offers a signed edition. Although it is definitely not a great piece of writing, Innocent World is proof that publishers are beginning and willing to translate books that do not belong to the Mishima, Tanizaki, and Kawabata mold or even the Murakami H., Yoshimoto, Murakami R. mold. With the translation of this work and Kanehara Hitomi's Snakes and Earrings hopefully the American audience will be exposed to a wider range of Japanese literature than what is currently available.

As for the book itself...I consider it a decent, fast read. Besides the main character, Ami, the books other characters come off being pretty flat. However, considering Ami tends to know very little about the individuals around her, including her own parents, maybe the lack of character detail stems from the isolated nature of the main character than lack of depth writing by the author.

I guess I am the minority with my review. I thought this book was a yawn. Shock value aside (incest and rape, along with a shocking surprise at the end), it read like a high-schooler's angsty prose. I found myself skipping through much of the overly-descriptive thought, just to get to the point. I rolled my eyes several times through plot twists as they were just plain absurd.

The book is a quick read (I finished it in about an hour). I wish I had just taken it out at the library instead of spending $10 on something I can read in one sitting.

All in all, the material is meant for 'mature' readers, but the style is clearly not. A lot of reviewers say that the 'love' between the main character and her brother is just 'beautiful', but I failed to see the beauty in animalistic um.... stuff between siblings. In my opinion, this book is purely shock value with no substance, so if that is your thing, then go for it.

The back cover tells you all you need to know. "Enter a world of nihilism and self-destruction...rape, incest and trauma...violence, drugs and prostitution. Enter an innocent world." Man, that cover copy sure makes rape, incest and trauma sound like some pretty exciting stuff!

That's right, this is a book about Decadent Youth. Ostensibly written to give a voice to the alienation and nihilism of modern young people, it also appeals to bored housewives, primetime-news anchors, and well-to-do high school girls who are like totally bored with having to study for college entrance exams. Wouldn't it be cool if they could like totally disregard their parents? It also may appeal to lonely teenage boys, by depicting a seductive, promiscuous babe, then playing on their fear of women by making her cold and materialistic, while also tapping into their heroic fantasies by making her just as lonely and isolated (hence rescuable) as they are.

The first sign that something is seriously wrong comes in the form of Sakurai's uncertain, yet lecturing tone in all of her descriptions of youth culture. It's like she watched a news broadcast about raves and drugs, and now she's trying to teach the reader something about drug and music jargon. So, during a visit to a rave, her protagonist states pedantically that "the music [the DJ] spun was too incantatory to be called techno" (76), which means absolutely nothing. And then she carefully explains the difference between ecstasy and cocaine, in case you don't know. Sounds like someone has been reading some alternative newspapers.

Oh, and by the way, just like in that news broadcast, the DJ turns out to be a rapist. In the worst tradition of de Sade, he woodenly proclaims on page 85, "I'll crush all your false pride and defense mechanisms so that by the end, your humiliation will make you feel like a piece of trash." But give him some credit, at least he made an effort to come up with that statement.

The other thing is that, for such a worldly babe, the protagonist romanticizes her loss of virginity a lot. In fact, her first time was with her true love, and even though it was his first time as well, he was able to easily send her into multiple ecstasies. This does not happen in reality.

In her quest to convey just how much her protagonist hates everything, Sakurai plagiarizes Yukio Mishima. Page 24: "My little white diary. In it I kept track of the life-worthiness of the grown-ups in Takuya's life." Hey, that's just the "list of crimes" from The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, except without all the truly odd and queasy stuff! The idea of the mentally retarded brother probably came from A Quiet Life by Kenzaburo Oe, with a lot of sex added in.

The protagonist is eventually redeemed in a very traditional way, by having a baby. This provides a respite from all the cheap nihilism, and it's even a little bit believable that she might feel that way. Unfortunately, it usually doesn't turn out that well in real life. Nor do most seventeen-year-old girls have that epiphany so easily.

But what makes this book so unintentionally hilarious is Sakurai's choice of metaphors. She sounds like nothing so much as a first- or second-year college student whose mind has been totally blown by a wide variety of fascinating technical subjects. In fact, I am inclined to conjecture that she really was a straight-A student at a top-level school, where her worst sin was an occasional drink at a party with her similarly hip and fashionable girlfriends. She had to take a couple of freshman electives, and even though she got one of the smart guys to do her homework for her, the effect on her prose was immeasurable. Drumroll, please:

Page 27: "The imaginary number i is a non-existent constant used only as a matter of convenience. Thus the value of my existence, too, is infinitely artificial and scant." (Complex analysis!)

Page 27: "The world exists to analyze chance and its contradictions and errors by induction." (Computer science!)

Page 37: "His heart and mind tended to take paths like some diagram of chaos theory that went beyond the realm of ordinary thought." (Physics!)

Page 40: "Through anonymous sex, men were slowly depleting my store of some valuable element. What remained with me was...the sadness of a space probe drifting forever in the vacuum beyond." (Okay, to be fair, this one sounds more like it was lifted from a Murakami novel. It's still awful, though!)

Page 41: "I sensed the possibility that some common circuit could form between us that opened to a special password." (Electrical engineering!)

Page 48: "A neon of phosphorescent animalcules swimming on the night sea's calm surface." (Biology!)

Page 53: "I'd finally met the man who could solve the differential equations that were Takuya and me." (Calculus!)

Page 56: "I didn't care if he was an old man on his deathbed; he had to be made to click on all the constants that I needed to solve the differential equation of my existence." (Oh man. I swear, I didn't make this up.)

Page 57: "In my imagination, my hatred was making his cancer viruses propagate at an exponential rate."

Page 88: "If you can't keep up with my biorhythm, you don't have the right."

Dear Japanese college students, please listen to me! Freshman year really isn't that bad. It'll be over eventually, I promise. If you want some cool nihilistic books to help you get through it, I recommend Yukio Mishima. And for the girls, try The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai. It also has a strong female protagonist, but unlike Innocent World, it's not completely terrible.

The entire time I was reading this book I couldn't help but think "what is the point of all of this?" The book is written in a sort of "journalistic" type of way from the main character's point of view. There is definately plenty of shock value: rape, insest, drug use, prostitution, and so on; but that's really not the point. Upon finishing it you realize it's more about coming to terms with yourself in society and finding a sense of closure and peace, in a sort of extreme, twisted way. In that sense the book succeeds.
The writing is pretty simple and you should have no problem finishing this in one sitting, though you may want to read through it one more time and analyze it further.

In her first work to be translated into English, Ami Sakurai's Innocent World is a quick peek into every middle class parent's nightmare: incest, casual prostitution, rape, and the utter nihilism of today's bourgeois youth. Part document of the numbed state of teenagers in Tokyo, part manga-like read, this novella is the book for those with an interest in the underbelly of Shibuya youth culture, in particular of how young women are able to divorce their bodies from their minds in pursuit of money - and what they will do for it.
The protagonist of Innocent World, Ami, is Every Young Girl in Tokyo: educated parents who send her to a private school, an absent father, a young woman lacking nothing who is utterly devoid of feeling. The only possible twist is that her older brother is retarded. She discovers that she was the product of fertility treatments that involved a sperm donor not her father (her mother did not want another child with developmental problems, for which she blamed her salaryman husband). This leads Ami in pursuit of Number 307: the man who donated his seed. On the way she prostitutes herself - perhaps out of boredom, perhaps out of resentment - and becomes physically and emotionally involved with her half-brother.
A depressing if insightful read.

The story of a young woman who has lost her family identity and has replaced it with prostitution and a loose association of friends who convinced her to join the prostitution ring. She sublimates her emotional connections with her mentally handicapped brother Takyura. The only way she can connect with Takyura is through sex. This book is witten with such dispassion that it seems that it could be read as non-fiction. I highly recommend this dark novella.

This book is really great. Not so sexual as you might think, great. Its really a great book. Check it out.

The horrid reviews stated on here might as well duplicate the relentless gang rape scene of the book. I don't care what anyone says, this book is a sublime read, every word, from start to finish. My only serious disappointment was that I did not ration myself better and finished it too quickly. If I didn't have Hillary Raphael's "I (heart) Lord Buddha" to act as methadone, I don't know how I would have handled the withdrawals from such a white-hot stellar piece of work.

It was rather bizaar how i found myself strangely aroused throughout this book...Yeah yeah i know she made Love to her brother and biological father but it had a sense of nessesity for them to connect. If you read this book and was disguished i request that you pick it back up with an open mind...If you are looking at this review and deciding whether or not you want to buy this book...stand forewarned...you much keep your mind open and your own judgements closed...

a little whack, but so much deeper and more intelligently written than other books of this ilk.