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| Grotesque (Vintage International) | 
 enlarge | Author: Natsuo Kirino
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  45 reviews
Sales Rank: 232724
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 544
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 1400096596
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.635
EAN: 9781400096596
ASIN: 1400096596
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
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Product Description
Life at the prestigious Q High School for Girls in Tokyo exists on a precise social axis: a world of insiders and outsiders, of haves and have-nots. Beautiful Yuriko and her unpopular, unnamed sister exist in different spheres; the hopelessly awkward Kazue Sato floats around among them, trying to fit in.Years later, Yuriko and Kazue are dead — both have become prostitutes and both have been brutally murdered.
Natsuo Kirino, celebrated author of Out, seamlessly weaves together the stories of these women’s struggles within the conventions and restrictions of Japanese society. At once a psychological investigation of the pressures facing Japanese women and a classic work of noir fiction, Grotesque is a brilliantly twisted novel of ambition, desire, beauty, cruelty, and identity by one of our most electrifying writers.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 40 more reviews...
 "I want to be number one. I want to be respected. I want to be someone whom everyone notices." March 31, 2007
27 out of 31 found this review helpful
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
Four stars because of the publisher's censorship April 10, 2007
19 out of 20 found this review helpful
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.
 The sun does not rise for everyone April 17, 2007
13 out of 17 found this review helpful
Ever since reading Kirino's rollercoaster mystery "Out" a couple of years ago I had been looking forward to more translations of this talented and intriguing writer. While this book leaves the rollercoaster for a visit to one life's many horror shows, I consider it -even in its censored version- a worthy successor to "Out" and gladly give it a full endorsement.
When I wrote my review for "Out" and stated "Women in Japan follow their European and American sisters still more than a few steps behind" I received a comment from an offended Amazonian on my misunderstanding of Japanese society. Yet, "Grotesque" again finds its basis in this concept.
In a fashion that resembles Akutagawa's "In a Grove", later turned in the Kurosawa classic Rashomon, several characters relate stories illuminating the murders of two Tokyo prostitutes. While the egos and opinions of the various narrators result in an often warped sense of reality, the events that shaped both victims' lives at a prestigious school appear pivotal to the path they would take in their later lives.
Among the voices in "Grotesque" is a demoted teacher and school president who discusses an analogy between the female school population and a set of organisms in a life or death competition for limited resources. There is little doubt that Kirino intended to link this concept to the continuing unequal treatment of women in the Japanese workplace in this novel. Yet, whereas the women in "Out" stuck together, those in "Grotesque" are in an almost life long batlle royale. A second central theme of the novel is the author's debunking that the concept of "selling one self", currently frightfully popular among the Japanese female adolescent population, will lead to anything good or worthwhile.
K. Valenti's remark about the censoring of the end was on the one hand disappointing (Knopf you bunch of self-satisfied cowards), but also took away some minor misgivings I had about the ramblings of the narrative's main voice. It is too bad that US editors cannot keep their hands of Japanese writers; Haruki Murakami's masterpiece "the Wind up Bird Chronicle" has also suffered from the unwarranted US cutting board.
Quite a few fellow Amazonians have expressed their disappointment with Grotesque when comparing it to "Out". I beg to disagree. While the book is admittedly different and not in the mystery genre, it stands on its own and is again very strong. Especially the Kazue episode is a poignant description of desperate self destruction.
I attended Kirino's April 4 reading from Grotesque at the New York City Kinokuniya store. It came as little of a surprise that the writer has little of the "can I please the hell out of you" attitude of many of her Japanese sisters. Both in voice and behavior she struck me more a product of de Sade's, Sartre's and de Beauvoir's Paris, than of imperial Tokyo. She dutifully struggled through a reading of the first part of the third section of the book in which the battle with the word "lasciviousness" was unintentionally comic, but very effectively set the tone of dark desperation. At this reading Knopf mentioned that they intend to continue to publish translations of Kirino's works at a speed of one a year. While it is to be hoped that they will refrain from further PC interference in this writer's works, further translations will likely deepen the appreciation for the existentialist patron saint of the lost and the hopeless.
 Not a major author December 30, 2007
12 out of 20 found this review helpful
This is not the voice of a major novelist. She has gotten some great reviews, both here on Amazon and in print, but the reviewers are mainly discussing her work as a reflection of contemporary Japan: in other words, they are reading it as documentary evidence of social phenomena. As a novel, "Grotesque" is fairly poor. Two points about that.
1. In three sections of the book, we read texts written by characters other than the protagonist of the novel (who writes, or narrates, the novel itsef). The first and third are diaries, and the second is a court deposition. But the styles of all three are almost completely uniform with the style of the protagonist. I can imagine that it might be said that this is a translation, but I am basing this on traits that survive translation. It's very improbable that the two diarists and the accused man writing in custody will have exactly the same chatty style, the same apostrophes to the reader, and even the same manner with spoken dialogue. Even phrases are repeated. And it seems especially improbable that a police deposition will flower into a long, fairly skillful, first-person narrative with speaking characters, whose pace, style, and mannerisms is such a close match for the novelist's pace, style, and mannerisms.
2. The book's main purpose is to explore the characters of the narrator and her friends and relatives. All are twisted -- made grotesque -- by Japanese society. The narrator herself is grotesque, and so the novel turns on the old, and potentially interesting, trope of the unreliable narrator. How twisted is she? Can we rely on what she says? I would like to say that Kirino is actually not very introspective, that she is not the best person to write about these characters. That sounds improbable, I know: anyone who accuses a novelist of being less than introspective will sound suspicious. But consider two things:
(a) Several characters in the book are prostitutes, and the book is centrally concerned about why they turned to prostitution, and how the pressures of Japanese society affected that choice. But a reader waits, through hundreds of pages, for some rumination, on the part of any of the characters, about what prostitution does for them. Halfway through the book, there is on brief passage in which one of the diarists considers the issue. It is inconclusive, and isn't followed up. And then, a page from the end of the novel, the narrator reminds us of it, and actually quotes it! As if we could have forgotten! The lines introducing the passage are: "In her diaries, Yuriko made some interesting comments about prostitution. If you'll indulge me, I will quote them here." There isn't even an acknowledgment that the imaginary reader might have forgotten the lines; the assumption seems to be that they will have forgotten. But how could any attentive reader forget the only lines in the novel that purport to explain the central problem of the novel?
(b) The characters, especially the narrator, tend to identify themselves according to simple types and ideas. The narrator describes her special genius as maliciousness. I did not count the number of times she says that -- it's on the order of fifty or sixty. Now there's nothing wrong with that device: it indicates the narrator has an idee fixe about herself. She makes no progress in understanding herself. But to use that kind of device, it is necessary not to make it seem as if the reader doesn't know it, or might have forgotten it. Here is an example: aside from maliciousness, the narrator also presents herself as a person who is fascinated by people's faces, and the way that traits can be passed on from one generation to the next. We learn that in the first two pages of the book, and whenever she meets someone new she studies their face for signs of their character. So do we really need to be told, on page 298 (!), that "I was fascinated by the way genes are passed along, the way they are damaged and mutated"? I want to be clear about my claim here: it can work very well to have a character repeat something about herself -- it can indicate stasis, or unawareness, or even dementia -- but here it sounds as if the novelist has an idea about the character -- this is how the character behaves -- and just brings it out each time, hoping the repetition will create a sustaining or evolving or deepening sense of the character. It ends up sounding like the author does not have the imagination to either show us verbatim repetitions as a sign of the "grotesque," or else modulate the appearances of the character's idee fixe so that it can tell us something new about the character with each appearance.
It is difficult, and time consuming, to try to express these characteristics. But they are, I think, very important. They are among the differences between an ordinary novelist and someone who really controls the medium.
Invisible Monsters May 2, 2007
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
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.
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