Grotesque, by Natsuo Kirino; translated by Rebecca Copeland
What is this book? On one level, it's a crime story, a murder mystery of a sort, a serial killer novel, even. But it is so much more than just that. It's the story of two prostitutes, Yuriko Hirata and Kazue Sato, apparently murdered by the same man in Tokyo within the space of a year. The main narrator, Yuriko's sister, is never named in the book, but she's a plain, middle-aged, middle-class public employee, who tells us what she knows of her sister's and her friend's youth, how they resorted to prostitution, and what she can piece together about their strange ends.
At any rate, it seems that something happened with those two. Two people who were such complete opposites in looks, intelligence, and circumstances end up as prostitutes and then get killed and abandoned by the same man? The more you think about it, the less likely it seems that you could find an account more bizarre. The incidents with Yuriko and Kazue irrevocably changed my life.
The narrator and Yuriko are "half": their mother is Japanese, their father is Swiss. And neither fits neatly into the society around her. Yuriko is beautiful, stunningly so, head-turningly so, mesmerisingly so, and this accident is the central fact dominating her sister's, the narrator's, life, as she feels permanently and relentlessly subject to unfavourable comparison. We see how this feeling of never being quite pretty enough, and never quite clever enough to overcome that deficit, makes her turn her in on herself. Her growth is restricted, perverted even, like one of her grandfather's bonsai trees. But we also discover in time and as the viewpoint shifts that Yuriko's beauty is her own curse as well as her sister's. Sexual attention is the only attention she will ever gain; sex, the only kind of love she will find.
That was the first time I noticed that the men who embrace me, every single one of them, end up with an expression of emptiness when they are done, as if they have lost something. Maybe that is why I am always in search of a new man. Maybe that is why I am now a prostitute.
Both sisters know Kazue from their schooldays at the elite Q High School, where the painfully thin, almost ugly Kazue strives for social acceptance and success. But she, too, will be disappointed. Kazue's story is one of the hopelessness of aspiration for a Japanese woman: no matter how hard she tries, no matter what she achieves, she is just a woman, and can only find success or happiness on men's terms.
If you promise not to believe a word of it, I'll let you see what she wrote. But you really must not believe it. It really is a complete fabrication. A number of the Chinese characters she used in the journal were written incorrectly. And then there were places where she left out characters, and others where the characters she wrote were just plain ugly or else really hard to decipher. I've rewritten those parts.
This is the story of the narrator, too. It's the story of her own childhood, how the oppressiveness of the society around her and in which she is never noticed by men, nor accepted by other women feeds malice within her. It's the story of three woman made monsters in a monstrous world. Sounds like a pessimistic, misanthropic view of Japanese life? It certainly is that.
I hate the orange colour of the train. I hate the gritty wind that whips through the tunnels. I hate the screech of the wheels. I hate the smell. Usually I wear earplugs so I can avoid the sounds, but there's not much I can do to avoid the smell. And it's always worse on rainy days. It's not just the smell of dirt. There's the smell of people: of perfume and hair tonic, of breath and age, sports pages and makeup and menstruating women. People are the worst. There are the disagreeable salarymen and the exhausted office ladies. I can't stand any of them.
The novel is scathing about corporate sexism: Japanese firms are portrayed as a recruiting women simply as workhorses and then promoting them on the basis of their looks; women are fodder to be dated, propositioned, or sexually harassed while management looks the other way; if they don't play that game, they're to be ignored. Ultimately, in the office or in the street, they're to be bought. The whole of Japanese society is seen as exploiting women in this way. They work to support men; their existence is conditioned entirely by their sexual appeal and usefulness to men.
I got up on time this morning, boarded the train, changed to the subway, and worked like an aggressive career woman in one of the biggest corporations around. At night I transformed into a prostitute sought out by men. Suddenly I remembered the argument I had had earlier with Arai and stopped short. I'm a company employee day and night. Or is it that I'm a prostitute night and day? Which is it? Which one is me?
I was completely captivated by this book. I could hardly put it down, as they say, and easily read more than a hundred pages in a session. It's not because of suspense, either, or shocks. Not at all. Natsuo Kirino is just such an assured story-teller that the narrative powers you along whether you're reading about the antics of bitchy schoolgirls, of miserly parents, of a mad grandfather, or whether you're reading the searing, shocking confession of a murderer, a Chinese immigrant adrift after desperately escaping poverty and the frightening crowd in his own country. The way Kirino handles multiple narration is amazing: each new world (the main narrator's, Yuriko's, from her diaries, Kazue's from hers, the murderer Zhang's, even Kijima's from his letters) is convincing and distinct; perhaps Kazue and the narrator are the most similar, but even here I never felt disorientated. Each narrator draws you in within a page, and none becomes tiresome: not once did I feel I'd become bored of one narrator or feel a wish to return to another. The way Kirino teases us with the narrators' unreliability is fun, too - she knows we know it's a trick that's been done many times before, but even as she jokes with us about it, she makes it all work.
A permanent virgin. Do you know what this signifies? It may sound wholesome and pure to you, but that was not actually the case. Kazue articulated it brilliantly in her journals, didn't she: to miss the only chance one has to have power over a man. Sex is the only way a woman has to control the world. That was Kazue's twisted view, at any rate. But now I can't help but wonder about whether or not she was right.
I find it difficult to praise this novel enough. It's much more than genre fiction - the blurb on the book's cover calls Kirino a "crime writer", but you might be disappointed if you picked this up hoping for a mystery or a thriller. "Who killed Kazue?", you're left wondering. All I can say is that Tokyo killed Kazue. This book is a caustic social commentary, a bitter shout of anger at an unchangeable world. It's also a sophisticated, full novel of character and place, a dark, troubling vision of the relationship between men and women, of Tokyo and of Japan. A serious and highly readable novel.
Christopher Fowler shared my enthusiasm in The Independent last year; and Christine Thomas thinks Kirino gives Murakami a run for his money - I very much agree. Sophie Harrison in the New York Times was a bit sniffy about the translation - I'm not. Yes, the novel occasionally seems slightly "foreign" rather than reading like mother-tongue English, but that may be inevitable - anyway, it works very well. And I think Elisabeth Vincentinelli was ungenerous in Time Out New York to say the book is only of "middling literary quality" It's not.
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