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I read this novel as part of a class on Modern Japanese Literature at Temple University. It’s been an absolutely incredible and fun class with the largest percentage of pleasurable reading of all my classes save one. Grotesque is the penultimate novel in the class. We’ll be finishing with Haruki Murakami’s new novel After Dark, and you can expect a full, detailed, and probably adoring review when we get there.

Natsuo Kirino began her literary career as a romance writer then switched to writing crime fiction. I can’t comment on her previous novel, Out, but Grotesque is no typical crime novel. This is no “whodunit”. Kirino uses the murder of two prostitutes as an excuse to provide character sketches of some horrifyingly unredeemable people. There is no character to root for, no good guy, no hero. Everyone has something to loathe about them, including the unnamed narrator, the older sister of late prostitute Yuriko who presents these people to us in a way that makes you wonder just how legit the story even is. No matter how reliable the narrator, however, Kirino uses her and the other characters to reveal a dark underside of Japanese society that is shocking, and yet not unexpected.

What’s shocking here is not the graphic sexuality and dark undertones of the narrative.^[1] In fact, any Internet user in their late teens and early twenties is likely to have seen more bizarre sexual practices and fetishes to associate with Japan. The shock comes from Kirino’s depiction of Japanese society, and how it treats anyone who does not fit in with the societal norms. Each major character has some element that puts them out on the fringes of the Japanese world. The narrator and her sister Yuriko are “half”, having a Swiss father and Japanese mother. Kazue, who attended the same prestigious High School as the narrator and Yuriko, comes form a working class background and constantly tries to make herself fit in. Zhang, Yuriko’s murderer, is an illegal Chinese immigrant with an incest fixation. Another classmate, Mitsuro, makes it to number one in her classes, though is a high school social outcast, and falls in with an Aum Shinrikyo style cult after leaving medical school.

Kirino casts a sharp, critical eye on Japanese social structures through the scenes at Q High School. Q is the most prestigious educational institution in Japan, and has a strict social stratification; if you’re lucky to get in at pre-school level, you’re part of the inner circle. You have power, you have social clout, and the only way to join if you get in later is to be rich, beautiful or both. Beauty is a reoccurring element—Yuriko is the most beautiful girl in the school, setting on fire a whole holy host of lusts among students and teachers. Sex becomes a tool to get what she wants. Kazue is her polar opposite: poor, ugly, and unpopular, deluded into believing that hard work can get her everything she wants: good grades, beauty, money, and popularity. Likewise, Yuriko’s beauty casts the narrator in a strongly negative light; they look nothing alike, and few can believe they’re related, least of all the narrator herself. Even in discussing her sister, or anyone else, the narrator admittedly fudges details to emphasize what she wants.

How Yuriko and Kazue fall into prostitution speak to the position of women in Japanese society. For Kazue, in a fashion, sex becomes the way she can exert control over her environment and her life. For Yuriko, sex is a formality in getting the male attention she craves. Neither follows the ascribed path of “school, work, marriage, children” that is de rigeur in Japan. Neither does the narrator, a single woman and freelance employee. Japanese society, in turn, casts them out into the fringes, and further out as they age, making redemption that much more difficult, if it’s desired at all. The novel’s climax reinforces the futility of this problem of Japanese society, seemingly leaving the narrator with no potential release from the trap that caught Yuriko and Kazue.

For anyone with a curiosity about Japanese society that extends beyond Hello Kitty and tea ceremonies, Grotesque is required reading. Kirino’s criticism, as the Japan Times notes, “cuts too close to the bone”. Any society based on repression of difference is bound to give rise to a dark underside where those differences with be maintained. Grotesque shows it to us, and it lives up to the novel’s name. Though it does drag somewhat in the middle, particularly during Zhang’s testimony and trial, Grotesque comes highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Japan that extends beyond the popular conception.

1. Though it’s worth nothing that the American version was censored to remove a section involving underage male prostitution. There’s a number of references to underage female prostitution left intact, but sex involving young boys is apparently a no-no for American publishers and audiences. ↩