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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104337 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-12
• Released on: 2008-02-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400096596
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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.

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.

Review
"[Grotesque] buoys itself along with depraved urbanity, acute social consciousness, gallows humor and a chorus of odd and damaged voices. Readers will find themselves enchanted as though by some demented orchestra. . . . Behind this social critique of Japan as appearance-obsessed dystopia lurks a series of more mystical and complex questions about the ultimate mystery of human beauty.”
–The Tennessean

“Despite the story’s dark tenor, the narrative charges forward with haunting leisure, seducing with access to the sordid underbelly of traditional Japanese life. . . . Harkening to Kurosawa’s 1950s film Rashoman, each narrative presents conflicting testimony, and through this we must reconstruct the past.”
–The Miami Herald

“Kirino provides an energized thrill ride as she also examines the sometimes-stifling stranglehold of Japan’s social hierarchy, especially for women.”
–Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Kazue’s journal is the novel’s chilling heart. . . . Grotesque’s clean, compassionless prose conveys muted isolation and the misery of aging sex workers with brutal efficiency.”
–Time Out (Chicago)

“A harrowing look at human physiognomy, desire and competition. . . . Kirino's gifts are such that it is almost impossible to look away even as Grotesque illuminates the most depraved elements of human nature.”
–The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

“Grotesque succeeds as a layered exploration of the human psyche, of the conflict inherent in need and desire, shame and humiliation. Character after character dissolves, until finally the haughty narrator herself becomes the very thing she hates the most, a desperate woman seeking love. . . . The brilliance of the novel lies deep in the crevasse of her obsession. In pursuing her beautif...

Customer Reviews

Four stars because of the publisher's censorship
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.

Invisible Monsters
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.

Stunning psychological exposition
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.