Customer Reviews

Real World

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Natsuo Kirino's "Real World" is a Japanese coming-of-age story with sobering twists. She has structured her narrative as a relay race between the major players: each character takes her or his turn from the first-person perspective describing the ongoing action, discussing their thoughts and motivations, and revealing their not-so-pretty histories.

The high school girls of "Real World", though markedly different individually, have a few things in common. They worry about school. They talk about relationships. They all think they are hiding something from each other when in fact their fears, flaws, and sexual practices are all too obvious to their peers. Above everything else, they loathe their parents.

Therefore it is not surprising that, when a teenage boy outside their circle goes on the run after being accused of murdering his mother, their reaction is initially one of empathy and fascination rather than repulsion. Their decisions to help him cover his tracks, and subsequently protect each other, have ramifications that will last for the rest of their lives.

The result is an engaging character study of Japanese teenagers facing the pressures of Japanese society - observing familial obligations, meeting cram school demands, avoiding perverts on the train - and suddenly being confronted with a situation none of them has the maturity to handle. Particularly interesting is Kirino's portrait of the teenage boy as the fugitive whose grip on reality unravels before our eyes.

I have two objections to the novel. The first is one of authenticity: although externally the girls exhibited differences (one is smart, one is a lesbian, one is a slut, and so on), their internal monologues were painfully similar, so much so that I was constantly losing my suspension of disbelief. This gave rise to my second objection: I frequently wanted to yell, "You idiot!" to the particular narrator at various points of the novel. Dealing with teenagers, this might be expected, but the similarity between their voices, and hence the lack of individual 'reasoning' when it came to decision-making, made me frustrated with these female anti-heroes. Still, I remained attached to the book until the very end.

I would recommend "Real World" specifically to those readers who have an interest in modern Japanese culture. Based on other sources, I think the environment Kirino describes is accurate, and the struggles faced by teenagers there realistic and reflected in her writing. As to whether she does justice to her characters, or if they are merely facets of herself projected into different situations, is a little harder to tell.

It is difficult to imagine what the Japanese reading audience makes of Natsuo Kirino's dark, nihilistic portrayals of her native country, but her success there as a mystery writer suggests that they must find in her work a compelling mirror of themselves. However, Ms. Kirino's bleak, female-centered representation of Japanese society in OUT, GROTESQUE, and now REAL WORLD creates a milieu at least as horrifying as any of the bloody, heartless actions performed by her characters. Her only three novels so far to be translated into English may feature cruel murders and shocking dismemberments, but for many Western readers, inscrutable Japan may well be her books' most terrifying character.

As she did in OUT, her first novel to be translated into English, Ms. Kirino centers her attention in REAL WORLD on four female friends. This time, however, her focus shifts from the adult world (the four lead characters in OUT were all night shift workers at a box lunch factory) to that of adolescent teens in the summer before their senior years of high school. The four girls are teen archetypes: Toshi the straight arrow, Terauchi the intellectual, Yuzan the boyish lesbian not yet quite out of the closet, and Kirarin the secretively adventuresome one. Cram school and study sessions to prepare for their upcoming college entrance exams weigh heavily upon them, as oppressive and enveloping as summer humidity.

Each girl faces the uncertainties of young adulthood with trepidation - college, or not; dreary life with an office lady career and marriage to a salary man, or something less stultifying than their parents' lives; remaining a virgin, or hooking up; accepting one's sexual identity, or conforming. Each maintains her public front among her best friends, schoolmates, and family as though wandering through a masked ball, all the while wrestling with far deeper internal conflicts, resentments, hatreds, and insecurities. Even their names are signifying masks. Toshi, for example (whose full given name Toshiko means nothing more than ten and four, representing her birth date of October 4), adopts the alter ego Ninna Hori, Japanese characters for a temple moat. Yuzan, on the other hand, is really Kyomi Kaibara; her name Yuzan was borrowed from the father character in a popular manga series.

Into the midst of this angst-ridden circle of teen females falls Toshi's teen-aged boy neighbor, nicknamed Worm by the girls, who has just murdered his mother with a baseball bat and escaped to the countryside on Toshi's bicycle. The four girls are drawn into the Worm's orbit like moths to a flame: Toshi aids Worm's escape by refusing to answer questions from the police detective, Yuzan loans him her bicycle and buys him a new cell phone, and Kirarin joins him "on the run." Seemingly small acts matter, and unintended consequences abound. Each girl in her own way is fascinated by his willingness to act, to strike out without concern for the consequences against the aspects of his life that aggrieve him. What appears as an outwardly senseless criminal act to the media-driven adult world seems understandable if not perfectly reasonable to them. Would that they had the courage to act as he did, to lash out against the constraints and hypocrisies in their own lives.

Ms. Kirino tells her story by alternating voices from chapter to chapter among the four girls and Worm. By doing so, she gradually uncovers disturbing aspects of each girl's life - indifferent parents, absentee fathers, a daughter left alone with her mother as she slowly dies from ovarian cancer, a mother having an affair, unfaithful boyfriends, sexual harassment of a young girl on her daily train ride to school. Yet even as the girls' respective characters take shape and add complexity, the fugitive Worm - the book's central male character - regresses from a threatening, Raskolnikovian nihilism to a frightened, blubbering infantilism. Kirino's is a distinctively female world, dominated by mothers, female police detectives, school friends, and lesbian friends of Yuzan who take on names like Dahmer (as in Jeffrey, the cannibalistic American serial killer). Males are ineffectual or absentee fathers, clueless braggadocios like Worm, gays, and boyfriends who act thoughtlessly, or tentatively and too late.

REAL WORLD reveals the crime and its perpetrator in its first pages, so the crux of its story is not solving the crime, nor is it even the chase. Rather, Ms. Kirino uses a shockingly brutal and apparently senseless act to explore its effect on four young women sitting at the cusp of adulthood. She thereby shines a stark light on the Japanese teen female psyche, drawing a picture of child-adults who are variously scared, victimized, misunderstood, ignored, oppressed by adult and societal expectations, and altogether alienated from the world around them.

As in her two previous books translated into English, Ms. Kirino proves herself more a social critic employing the murder mystery genre than a mystery writer. Her interests are not in the crime or even the chase, but in the main actors themselves and those who events draw in from the periphery. If, as it is said, the novel gives readers a chance to go places they might never go, see things they might never see, and meet people they might never meet, then Ms. Kirino's books certainly accomplish this feat for Japan, particularly for Western readers. However, the people, places, and things she shows us about her country are as darkly disturbing as the murders that precipitate her chains of events. Her bleak ending in REAL WORLD offers little hope of redemption or a better future for her characters. Only Toshi seems to make a positive movement forward, yet we know she is scarred for life and doubtless headed for the same sterile future her parents have lived. As Worm's case illustrates (further amplified by the actions of the philosophically intellectual Terauchi), there is no hope of escape from their societal straightjacket.

"Real World" is not just a book about Japan and young Japanese people, it is, in fact a written semi-fictional recording of modern-day Japan as it really has become these days. I should know, I live in Tokyo. I have lived here over 15 years and I have seen it all change so very much. And these days young Japanese are just like Worm and Toshi in so many ways, and THAT is what make this so book so significant and horrifying! Also Kirino is right on the mark with her portrayals of Japanese brainwashed college students, teachers, parents and the overkill 'Authority Rules' group mind that is destroying young individual students before they can even graduate. Get this book and read it. You may not believe some of it, but, believe me, its all too true. Five stars.

Like so much Japanese "literature", what we have here are extremely perceptive observations about the modern world and its transgressions, the moral quagmire of disaffected city-dwellers, and a search for meaningful "world" in a hopelessly fragmented society. It's all pretty heady, interesting stuff I suppose, but "Real World" is a bleak book about self-absorbed, nihilistic Japanese teenagers who despise conventionality and embrace a pathetic, odious murderer.

The plot revolves around the absolutely horrific crime of matricide and a small click of girls who wind up becoming "groupies" of the kid who smashed in his mom's head with a baseball bat. Sound pleasant? There are certainly some interesting details about how Japanese teenagers view their social "worlds" as being artificial constructs, and long for a transcendental experience to elevate them out of their monotony.

Unfortunately, for all of this oft-repeated metaphysics -- there is scarcely any plot or momentum in the book. It consists of chapter after chapter of first-person testimonials from the girls and the obnoxious murderer himself, about how this has played into their own feelings of isolation and hatred of modern society. Kirino's teenagers are all kind of superficial and boring, even if they have a certain gloss of verisimilitude. The one that comes across the most like the author herself, Terauchi, is of course also the most brilliant observer of the human condition and dishes out some philosophy on true acts of psychological rebellion versus merely superficial acts of hatred and revenge. But it's not a whole lot to chew on for a reader that's slogged through to 150 pages. Ugh.

On one level, this book is a trenchant if depressing portrayal of a lost generation. But honestly, it's a very unbalanced book, tiresome to get through, and ultimately about a repulsive subject. Happy to put it down.

REAL WORLD, Natsuo Kirino's third novel available in English, is as much a modern coming of age story as a psychological thriller, set in suburban Tokyo. At the centre are four girls - teenagers - and their inner musings. They are apprehensive about growing up and question who they really are. They also realize an increasing alienation between their own "real world" and that of the adults around then. They feel controlled by parents, teachers, and, by extension, pressured by the strictures imposed by Japanese society.

Toshi, Terauko, Kirarin and Yuzan, represent four different character types, ranging from the all-round nice and serious teenager or the cool and intelligent to the flirtatious and wild to the "mannish" behaving, concealed lesbian. While they constantly communicate by texting or cell phone chats, they each try to hide part of who they are from each other, although the others know anyway. Each has her own worries and anxieties, problems with her parents and the other sex. This summer's teenage "angst", however, is focused mainly on the push to prepare for the state exams, attending summer cram school. Suddenly all this is being derailed after a woman's murder next door to Toshi's house. The son, a boy the girls' age, nicknamed "Worm" is the presumed killer and he is on the run. Although Toshi had heard some loud commotion in the house and met the boy shortly afterwards outside the house in the street, she does not report anything to the police. Nor does she reveal that Worm has stolen her cell phone and bike to get away. Her girlfriends start receiving phone calls from her cell... and the story takes off from there.

Narrated alternatively from the perspectives of the girls and Worm, the author takes the reader into the young people's minds and each individual's perspective on the events as they unfold. In some way or other the four friends have all got caught up in the escape, motivated, initially, by some strange fascination of the boy and his action. Mixed in are their feelings of disapproval of their own parents, the half-truths and lies they know of each other, their own deeply held fears. While their individual background and personality is described as being different, they have much in common and their voices are complementary rather than distinct. Worm, the only male voice, is depicted as a confused angry boy, who, being on the run, feels like his action is opening for him a door into a new and different reality. Eventually all of them discover that some things are "irreparable" and the consequences have to be suffered. While Kirino very aptly gets into the minds of the girls, not all their subsequent behaviour is plausible. For me, she is least convincing in her presentation of the boy's thought processes and actions during the ordeal. The conclusion, however, is dramatic and, in some aspects, comes as a complete shock and surprise.

Best known here for her earlier novel "OUT", Japanese author Natsuo Kirino's is a very popular and award winning author in her country and has been categorized as a Japanese "feminist noir" author. [Friederike Knabe]

I picked this up, having read everything available by Haruki Murakami and Yoko Ogawa, hoping that it would be equally good. It wasn't.

The story is summarized elsewhere, so I won't bother. Instead, I will focus, as usual, on what is good and what is bad.

The good things about the book are that it is relatively introspective. The characters might be stupid and vapid, which I will address again shortly, but the story itself at least has some merit. Unlike Murakami, who also focuses on the otherness around us and our inability to understand it or ourselves, Kirino actually takes a stand with her characters. This is both good, in that it requires a person to take a stand and actually make a point, and bad in that it alienates some readers who don't identify with the characters as well. That was about all that was good about the book.

The bad was more obvious. First, the characters were stupid, vapid, and indistinguishable. The four girls, who are supposed to be entirely separable characters, are not. The four of them are completely stupid, believing that they have problems and that they know the world. Probably they do have problems and probably they do know the world, but very little of either. Listening to their existential angst is almost painful in its absurdity.

It's worth reading if you are really curious about modern Japanese youth, but there really isn't a lot to it. Just don't get your hopes too high.

C

Harkius

I am not a fan. Here's a bit why:

Yes Kirino's latest release is a psychological study of the female psyche, following the same format she used in *Out* and *Grotesque.* Yes it is about murder, isolation, sexuality, violence, alienation, camaraderie-those themes that popularized her other translated works.

Yet *Real World,* for me, fails because its themes are so formulaic: she has already told this story. Although Kirino channels herself through a clic of high school girls (and a murderous boy), therein going in a different direction than she did in *Out* with its band of housewives and *Grotesque* with its shifting temporality, what she actually has to say is old news: over-emphasis on education; the dissolution of the family; teenage prostitution; the pressures of a dystopic Japanese society that have given rise to murders such as Sakakibara (Youth A) and, now, Worm--the political slant of the novel is undone by its sheer repetitiveness. So when the story ends with the clic in disarray and the "world" of the youth shattered, one cannot help but yawn. All that's missing is a passionate sex scene in the woods while the murderer and his lover are on the run from the police...oh, wait, that's in there, too.

Kirino similarly fails to capture the voice(s) of Japanese youth in a convincing manner. Although this may be the fault of the translator, the multiple voices within the novel itself hardly stand apart from one another, lending to confusion at times and wrapping the story in stale phraseology (what teenage boy calls his mother "old lady"?), banal dialogues, and an overall tiresomeness that is difficult to shake. The interiority of the characters is impressive, and each has her (hardly culture-specific) issues to resolve (promiscuity, sexual orientation, overall geekiness). So it's unfortunate that there is no depth to the voices Kirino tries so hard to create.

What to do with this story, then? At 208 brisk pages, it's light reading compared to Kirino's other works and may even be entertaining in some passages. And if you like translated books from east asia that feature an Asia woman's eye on the cover (*Out* and *Grotesque* come to mind here, too, along with any number of others) then this book might be worth having.

One Murder + Four Girls = What is going on?

Toshi's neighbor has just killed his mother and stolen Toshi's cellphone and bike. Now, he is calling all the girls in her contact list. As "Worm" does, Toshi, Yuzan, Kirarin, and Terauchi begin to learn something new about themselves and their world and how they fit in.

This is one of those books that, when I've finished reading, I go, "Huh?" The writing itself isn't bad (although I can't judge that too harshly as it is an English translation and who knows what the original was like). The insight into a teenager's life in Japan was insightful and somewhat scary. The level of detail into these girls is admirable. And yet, I spent most of my time wondering how this could be called a psychological thriller/mystery/crime novel and wondering when something would actually happen.

Our cast of characters are filled with some of the dumbest I've ever seen. I can understand Toshi not telling the cops in the beginning about hearing the murder, but when Worm starts calling these girls from Toshi's stolen cellphone, not a one even remotely considers telling the police. Instead, each girl tends to relate her melodramatic story in startling clarity and to dish on her three other friends in equally startling clarity.

For instance, we start with Toshi, the girl who hears the murder. She doesn't initially say anything (which I don't blame 100% as she at first didn't realize the repercussions and was scared of the attention), instead complaining about how adults' want to control her life. It really gets weird with Yuzan, who actually helps Worm by giving him her bike and a cellphone. I don't even really understand why, even if she was a repressed lesbian who lost her mother. Terauchi comes off as far too introspective for her age, and Kirarin tags along with Worm because that's what she does: flirts and hooks up with guys. As for Worm, I felt he was a hideous character that was constantly changing (at first happy to kill his mother, then a pervert, then an asexual soldier...he literally seemed to change every other page). I suppose if there had been one character that made a choice I could understand 100% and empathize with, I might have liked this book better.

The plot is agonizingly slow and really doesn't go anywhere. You find out within 30 pages who the killer is and then must follow him as he runs away. There is no tension, no wondering if the police are getting closer to catching Worm, no wondering if one of the girls is going to turn him in (they consider it briefly and dismiss it almost before it becomes a full-fledged thought). There is no scene where Worm talks with the girls and makes them wonder what their purpose is (thus providing the "psychological" aspect of the book). Instead, the girls seem to immediately want to discuss their place in the world with the barest of suggestion, and it doesn't seem too contingent on Worm's murdering his mother in the first place. Which makes me wonder why bother (until the end, that is). And while the book is "psychological" in some places, I scratch my head in wondering how this could be considered a "mystery". The killer is given in the first few pages and catching him never seems to be a push of the novel. So what is the mystery? The Real World? That seems a little deceptive, if you ask me.

However, I did like how it gave each of the four girls real fears. Toshi feared being out of control; Yuzan feared her sexuality; Terauchi feared herself; Kirarin feared relationships with men. Imbued in each is an intricate backstory of how their parents and surroundings made them to be the teenagers they are in this book.

There aren't many curses used here (I wonder if that is due to the translation), but there is quite a bit of sex (one girl has had sex and does so during the 208 page count, though never in graphic terms) and the violence factor is kinda high (sexual assault, violent murder, high body count).

While I did find myself lost and confused much of the time, I did enjoy getting a better insight into the life of a Japanese teenaged girl. This is an interesting book, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend to everyone as it is dark, disturbing, and somewhat deceptive (a mystery? Really?).

Brought to you by:
*C.S. Light*

There are at least two distinct "real" worlds described in "Real World", Natsuo Kirino's most recent novel to be published in the United States. There is the world of parents, teachers, police officers and other adults and there is the world of high school students being driven insane by the pressure exerted on them from the other world. The two worlds are almost but not completely discrete--when they come together it is a disaster for all concerned.

On one level the central action is the murder of a mother by a son--a murder described as seen by the son as the killer and also from the point of view of the mother being murdered, as imagined by her son. An artistic tightrope act like this--effortlessly shifting points of view, startling, almost horrifying images (the description of the metal bat hitting the victim's head and body, for example) done by a lesser novelist might be just the author showing off her verbal chops. For Kirino, though, every action by every character--whether carefully thought out, done at the spur of a moment or even random happenstance--serves her theme of the unbridgeable gap between high school students in Japan, who act as if they are insane but who aren't yet and their parents, who have given in to the insanity. While the murder is brutal, the response of the four girls in the clique at the center of the book is the real story. They are jaw-droppingly casual about the killing itself, even as they become more involved with Worm, the teenage killer, a neighbor of Toshi one of the girls in a clique. Worm steals Toshi's bike and cell phone. He begins calling the numbers in the phone, eventually reaching Terauchi, Kirarin and Yuzan, girls who are not so much friends as allies against the madness around them.

The central reality in all of the girls' lives is the level of the high school they attend--if one is a poor student at an elite school is that better then being a superior student at a merely good school--the college entrance exams they face and dread. Their lives have been based on an 11-month school year with a couple of weeks off between each of the three semesters and the one month summer break taken up by cram school to prepare them for the exams. This has been how they have lived for years, barely seeing their parents, fearful of the future, hating the present with its incessant smog alerts. The novel opens with a metallic voice from a loudspeaker announcing dangerous air quality, which Toshi ignores, a perfect image of how little affect adults have on the teenage world. Under these circumstances killing one's mother makes as much or as little sense as anything else. Toshi is more annoyed with the loss of her cell phone than the death of her neighbor and lies to the police almost naturally and certainly without compunction.

The book is structured as serial narratives from each of the girls. Toshi hears the killing take place next door--hears a struggle and glass breaking--but since she isn't interested in Worm or his mother, thinks little of it once she decides she isn't in danger. Her sections begin and end the book--her style is flat, unadorned and tough, describing both what she sees and what she feels with the same affectless tone. Kirarin is a beauty, one who has been subject to being groped and tormented on the subway by men beginning when she was nine years old. Unaccompanied in trips across the city to a "good" grammar school, wearing her school uniform sailor suit, she was a magnet for the men who molested her and now makes money by accompanying them to love hotels in the afternoon. Yuzan is a Lesbian who decides the real world is the gay subculture she found when she ditched her cram school to cruise gay bars. Both Kirarin and Yuzan are sexual misfits with no connection with their families.

"Real World" begins with murder and ends with suicide, accidental death and random violence. While not quite on the same level as "Out" and "Grotesque" it is a chilling and dismaying look at the world and an extraordinarily well done book.

Natsuo Kirino, a well known author in Japan, releases her third English translation with Real World. Real world follows four Japanese high school girls as they assist a boy that has just committed matricide in his escape.
The book is a really quick read and you actually care about the characters and start to sympathize with the "Worm" character. You almost understand why the girls are helping him. The characters are the lifeblood of this novel and Kirino fleshes out what seem to be stereotypical Japanese students into something a little more.
This is ultimately a book about consequences. Actions and inactions have consequences. The characters, still young, learn this throughout the novel the hard way. Well, at least the female characters do.
This isn't a great book, but it is a good book. I haven't read any of Kirino's other works so I don't have anything to base it on. The book does have an edge to it and can get very dark in places. I would suggest this book for high school age and up do to darkness and sexual content.