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Okay, disclaimer: I helped get this book made, as part of the pre-order project. I even sprung a bit extra for a commission.^[1] I wouldn’t have bough it if I didn’t think it was something impressive and amazing. Keep this in mind.

Templar, Arizona is an amazing webcomic that invents a plausible alternate reality for its setting with lavish detail. Described as “a slightly irregular Arizona that fell off the back of a truck somewhere, and now all the power outlets are a weird shape and a couple of wars never happened,” the titular city is a character in itself. Though it largely takes a back seat in the first chapter of the story—better to introduce the humans first—it pervades every aspect of the narrative. Templar has its own history, its own geography, and its own unique subcultures, religions, and quirks. It feels genuinely real.

The first print collection has the same lavish attention to detail. Beyond a remastering of the comic to fix errors in the online version, there is also the comic’s first intermission, copious annotations for both the main story and the intermission, and eight pages of sketches detailing the visual evolution of the comic. Oh, and the art is spectacular. Such a thing is required to be said. If there’s any shortcomings here, it’s in this being only part of a whole that is still in progress. As of this post, the webcomic is in Chapter 3, and the print edition of Chapter 2 is being fundraised for. It really leaves the reader wanting more.

It’s actually very difficult to say anything about Templar, and about this first collection that hasn’t already been said. If you’ve never read Templar, Arizona, start now. Pick up the book, if you like. This is something that is going to be very important.

1. The commission is of the band POLYSICS, and it is awesome. ↩

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It seems strange, especially knowing Murakami’s predilection towards the surreal and bizarre that reading one of his novels feels a bit like putting on an old, familiar t-shirt. The way he lets you slip comfortably into his world, the measured and precise revelation of the surreality just feels comfortable. After Dark is no exception to this, though it certainly does do some new and unusual things for a Murakami novel, just in a very comfortable way, even while deliberately trying to make the reader uncomfortable.

There’s a stylistic leap in this novel for Murakami. After Dark is the first of his many novels to be written in a third-person narration, albeit a third-person who acts very much like a first-person, speaking directly to the reader. “Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair,” starts the second line of the book. This third-person, omniscient (yet personable) narrator is necessary for the story’s structure, peering into the lives of four denizens of a single Tokyo night, and told in real-time.

The main character is Mari, a college freshman with insomnia, and we mostly follow her as she spends her night, first in a Denny’s, meeting by chance a friend of her older sister’s (who we shall get to in a moment), helping a beaten up Chinese prostitute get help, and talking about life with said friend, Takahashi. Takahashi is up all night rehearsing in a band and flirting/not-flirting with Mari. We see into the life of Shirakawa, an office worker with a dark secret… and then there’s Eri. Eri, Mari’s older sister, an ex-model, is sleeping. She’s been sleeping. She sleeps all the time, and she is where the story gets very odd.

Extremely deep and psychological, After Dark in its 191 pages takes the normally internal narrative of his fiction and successfully spreads it out across the Tokyo night. It has the same level of depth as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, packed into sparing, simple prose that combines elements of film noir with Murakami’s own unique psychology and themes. Even as an admitted fan of Murakami’s work, I’d have to say this is his best, next to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Certainly, it’s a great starting point for anyone new to his writing. Well worth reading.

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. ↩