This was not the book I was expecting.
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Natsuo Kirino, known for her crime fiction in Japan, has turned the genre inside out in this one, only the second of her 19 novels to be translated into English. There is a crime, to be sure: two prostitutes are slain, years apart, which we learn within the first ten pages. But there is little detective work here, as the murderer quickly confesses, and actually very little discussion of the crimes themselves. Instead of the typical whodunit or police procedural, GROTESQUE takes the form of a psychological study of the main characters in a stark and chilling style: there’s popular Yuriko, a girl so beautiful her sister hates her and calls her a monster; unpopular, awkward Kazue Sato, intelligent, driven, not-so-beautiful classmate of Yuriko at the Q High School for Young Women -- she’s everything Yuriko is not.
Zhang, the Chinese immigrant, user of women and confessed murderer; and, the nameless narrator, older sister of Yuriko, who seems to hate everyone, with special venom, her beautiful sister. Through the first-person narration of Yuriko’s sister, and various letters, Kazue’s journals, Yuriko’s diary, and court transcriptions of Zhang’s trial, we hear from the primary actors, and we are led to sort out their truthfulness. This is a novel in which everyone lies.
The novel delves into some of the darkest, most disturbing areas of the human psyche. Author Kirino is brilliant at exposing the innermost workings of her characters, the desires, the lies, the jealousies, the self deceptions. There are no winners here. These are damaged, ravaged souls. As I read, I saw the characters, oblivious themselves to the dangers they were facing, falling deeper and deeper into moral depravity. Kazue, despite her education and excellent job, seeks a different form of acceptance as a prostitute by night, leading ultimately to her murder. Yuriko, the girl, then woman, who had it all, finds attention from men to be her only source of comfort and worth.
I haven’t given anything away in this review -- there are few secrets withheld in GROTESQUE. Everything is out in the open, raw, uncensored. Which brings me back to the unexpected nature of this book. I anticipated a more conventional crime story, or I should say, conventional for Kirino, for her crime fiction is a unique category all its own, brutal, honest, starkly told. GROTESQUE is a difficult book to rate: I admire its boldness, and its cast of deeply drawn characters. I guess after 500+ pages I wanted it to take me somewhere. It left me sort of cold and stunned. There is no linear plotting to speak of, certainly no happy ending.
This is a bleak, lurid, stark and disturbing look at modern Japanese hierarchical culture, especially its treatment of women.
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