Grotesque (Vintage International) (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: juicy strawberry, ice skating team, Professor Kijima, Miss Hirata, Shinsen Station (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers with a taste for ambiguity and oddball characters will enjoy this twisted novel of suspense from Japanese author Kirino (Out). The Apartment Serial Murders case, which involved the brutal killings of two Tokyo prostitutes, has gripped the country, leading to the arrest of a Chinese immigrant, Zhang Zhe-zhong, for the crimes. Strangely, Zhang freely admits to murdering the first victim, Yuriko Hirata, but denies the near-identical slaying 10 months later of Kazue Sato. The events leading to the killings are related from a variety of perspectives—that of Yuriko's unnamed older sister, bitterly jealous of her sibling's good looks; of each victim; and of the accused. Unusual connections—for example, Kazue was a classmate of the older sister—cast doubt on the veracity of individual narrators. This mesmerizing tale of betrayal reveals some sobering truths about Japan's social hierarchy. 4-city author tour. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Natsuo Kirino's second novel to be translated into English confirms her as one of the elite novelists who are moving contemporary Japanese fiction into the American consciousness. Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami have led the charge, Yoshimoto with her odd, artless portraits of young people, and Murakami surveying the surreal with devastating, deadpan insight. In Grotesque, Kirino continues to stake out the territory she claimed in Out: the edges of the human psyche that darken toward horror.

Kirino's subjects are women and murder. Two women in their late 30s have been killed in similar fashion within a year of each other: Yuriko, a prostitute, and Kazue, a successful professional who was turning tricks on the side. They are linked by a nameless woman, older sister of the former and classmate of the latter, who lays out their histories and her own in a chillingly dispassionate, curiously defensive narrative.

Yuriko and her sister are daughters of a Japanese mother and a Swiss father. In Yuriko's case this has resulted in an "almost godlike" beauty. At the exclusive girls' school they attend, Yuriko rises effortlessly on looks alone, while awkward Kazue sweats for high marks and remains pathetically unaware of her permanent unpopularity. The narrator, neither beautiful nor brilliant, watches her sister and her friend and hones her "uncompromising ability to feel spite."

Born into a world of rigid hierarchies and enrolled in a school that makes these unspoken boundaries painfully plain, the girls come of age in an environment that Darwin would have recognized immediately. Images of evolution, adaptation and mutation are everywhere. The narrator classifies the various student species with scientific precision and dreams of a "very simple world" where "everything engages in a survival of the fittest and all living creatures exist just to procreate."

But emotion does not obey Darwinian rules. It mutates, and monsters are born, people "with something twisted inside, something that grows and grows until it looms all out of proportion." In a society that values conformity, Yuriko's beauty is too perfect, Kazue's cravings for success too obvious. As these young women mature, their excesses exile them from Japanese society -- and they find themselves suddenly free. This is the terrible paradox at the center of Kirino's work: In Japan, to be a monster, a grotesque, can be a kind of liberation. watches the trial of their accused murderer unfold, the narrator's malice turns into a kind of envy of the dead women, who in their sexual freedom flouted the society that rejected them. Grotesque is a powerful indictment of that society, its narrator's spirit "painted with hatred, dyed with bitterness." Kirino's women speak from beneath the lacquered surfaces of traditional Japan, in voices that need to be heard.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400096596
• ISBN-13: 978-1400096596
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #59,911 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Four stars because of the publisher's censorship, April 9, 2007

By	Grammatical Rappers (Seattle, wa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grotesque (Hardcover)

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Invisible Monsters, May 2, 2007

By	Jack M. Walter "Jack M. Walter" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grotesque (Hardcover)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stunning psychological exposition, March 30, 2007

By	Reid Scher "jetsfan" (Windham, ME USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Grotesque (Hardcover)

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.