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Grotesque

3.6 of 5 stars 3.60 · rating details · 3,411 ratings · 438 reviews

Two prostitutes have been murdered in Tokyo.

Yuriko had been working as a prostitute all her adult life, starting while still at school, where her stunning beauty compensated for what she lacked in intellect and commanded attention from older men.

Kazue worked for a blue-chip company and had good career prospects, but was unpopular with colleagues and felt isolated. She chos...more

Paperback, 467 pages

Published 2008 (first published 2003)

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Mar 22, 2012 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Few books start with a crackerjack opening; Lolita, Anna Karenina, The Journalist and the Murderer
and Tale of Two Cities are the only other ones I know of. This is the 5th.

And for a while she reuses the opening idea when other characters are introduced. An innovative technique.

I think this book went over the heads of most readers;
almost everything in the book is either a lie or a delusion.
For readers that "willingly suspend disbelief", this can be a challenge.

Because the author gives mult...more

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Jul 25, 2007 Radhika rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Natsuo Kirino is an impressive author. She has the power to really portray characters so vividly that I felt them get under my skin. I found myself detesting a character as if she was real. I found myself wrinkling my nose in distaste, hating some stupid things a person would keep doing, their blindness... I had to stop and remind myself that this was fiction and yet, time and again, Natsuo would draw me in. This is a rare gift and one that Natsuo employs to astounding results in this book. It i...more

7 likes · like · see review

Aug 26, 2008 NYLSpublishing rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to NYLSpublishing by: The NYLS Book Review

Recently, in a coffee shop near my home, I overheard one teenage boy intimating to another that if he were to ever marry it would not be to an American woman but a Japanese one because, “… they’re pretty, submissive, and just plain happy to be women.” Noting that more than a few eyelids batted at this exclamation, I wondered how these American teenagers happened upon their conclusions.

Kirino’s Grotesque is a tale of two sisters growing up in Japan. Yuriko, the youngest of the pair, lacks the me...more Recently, in a coffee shop near my home, I overheard one teenage boy intimating to another that if he were to ever marry it would not be to an American woman but a Japanese one because, “… they’re pretty, submissive, and just plain happy to be women.” Noting that more than a few eyelids batted at this exclamation, I wondered how these American teenagers happened upon their conclusions.

Kirino’s Grotesque is a tale of two sisters growing up in Japan. Yuriko, the youngest of the pair, lacks the mental acumen enjoyed by her older sister. However, in magnificent contrast to her elder sibling, Yuriko possesses a physical beauty so profound and holistically perfect she’s considered by many to be “unnatural”. Sibling rivalry comes to a head when a biology instructor at the prestigious Q High School for Young Women (the same school the elder sister immersed herself in study in order to pass its entrance exams) pulls strings to have Yuriko admitted so he may observe “…what happens when a mutant member of a species is introduced into a population”. Needless to say, this expands sibling conflict and upsets the tenuous balance between “the insiders” – those who are beautiful, wealthy, popular, and cool – and everyone else: “the outsiders”. This, of course, is what transpires on the novel’s surface. Beneath, the message is much grimmer.

Grotesque is an intriguing work. In it Kirino casts a wary eye on what could be ostensibly viewed as the fundamental cause of many of the ailments found in Japanese society today: the “intensification of individuation [resulting from:] being trapped within the same social community”. In this work characters with promising futures select paths which lead to their demise. Yuriko and Kazue, two female protagonists who attended the elite Q School, embrace prostitution throughout their lives. Kazue feels empowered by the sense of freedom she derives from “selling” her body to men and remarks to this in her journals. Mitsuru, another character which graduates the Q School system and continues on to become a physician, joins a cult and is incarcerated after the group engages in numerous terrorist acts. The desire to feel something – anything – seems to be the motivating force behind the destructive decisions these three characters make. It should be noted that neither of these three were ever actually “insiders” though Yuriko and Mitsuru were granted temporary passes. Is Kirino suggesting something by this? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In attempting to explain the strange synergy that exists between social pecking order, individual identity, and one’s place in the Japanese corporate hierarchy, Kazue puts it best when her “customer” terminates their relationship due to his pending retirement. She asks, “If a man has a retirement age in the corporate world, then should he also retire from buying prostitutes?”

Grotesque is a work which invites discussion. Readers seeking to peek into the envelope that contains Japanese social consciousness may very well find more than they bargained for in Kirino’s hand. It’s about time. Also, gratuitous formula sex is conspicuously absent from this book. Again, it’s about time. Kirino’s placement on the list of consequential modern authors is secure.

© Joel Glenn, Book Critic –The NYLS Book Review, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

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Mar 14, 2008 Yulia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: by-and-of-japan, criminal-intent, read-to-me-by-frank

(3.75) The other reviews can reveal what this book is about. What I wanted to share is the extreme responses this book incited in my boyfriend and me. He alternately found himself loving the narrator, Yuriko's sister, for her brutal honesty and hating her for her malice and psychological bullying of Kazue. Meanwhile, I found myself rooting the narrator on as she spoke the cruel truth about the pitiful hopelessness of Kazue's meritocratic dreams, but a moment later I wondered if that made me a bu...more (3.75) The other reviews can reveal what this book is about. What I wanted to share is the extreme responses this book incited in my boyfriend and me. He alternately found himself loving the narrator, Yuriko's sister, for her brutal honesty and hating her for her malice and psychological bullying of Kazue. Meanwhile, I found myself rooting the narrator on as she spoke the cruel truth about the pitiful hopelessness of Kazue's meritocratic dreams, but a moment later I wondered if that made me a bully myself or as bitter and heartless as the narrator. Perhaps it reminded me too much of what I had seen growing up to shock me.

Then, there was the simultaneous hilarity and pain of Kazue's cluelessness. Was she a tragic figure, blind, or both? I admired Kirino for inspiring me to feel so much for her characters, even for Yuriko, who is certainly not the ditsy airhead her older sister wants us to believe she is (I also found it hard to believe she was as ghastly as she considered herself in her 30s: is it just because women past 25 in Japan are regarded as Christmas cake, as a friend from Japan says?).

My attention was quite strained by Zhang's tale of Chinese hardship (it seemed the wrong book to educate the reader about how difficult it is for immigrants in Japan), but I immediately forgave Kirino when Yuriko's older sister admitted herself Zhang's account was tedious and could be skipped (I'd recommend others to skim it as well).

Again, my patience was tested by Kazue's journal: I just kept on thinking, aren't you ready to die yet? But I see this was intentional on Kirino's part, to make the reader struggle between our (or my) wanting Kazue to just give up on life and our feeling ashamed for our coldness and complicity in her bullying. It also made my boyfriend and me think concurrently of the people we loved in our own lives who were heading towards the same fate as Kazue and Yuriko, not through prostitution but through drugs.

What did disappoint me in the end was the last chapter, which seemed a cop-out. If only an editor had suggested it was unconvincing and encouraged her that an alternative, though more shocking, would be more in line with the narrator's character, but that is wishful thinking on my part. When I give this book to others, which I will, I will make sure to discuss with them, when they've finished, what they thought of the ending.

This book could have been edited down a hundred pages (back when it was written in Japanese), but for what it did offer, I have no regrets for its consuming my attention entirely and will always look forward to further translations of Kirino's books. This book may not be the masterpiece "Out" was, but for anyone who has gone to an elite school on scholarship, striven to remain a petite zero, wanted to excel while recognizing how off-the-mark our values of judgment are, or wondered just how much her body could be worth, reading "Grotesque" is just as powerful an experience as reading "Out" was.(less)

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Mar 14, 2008 Frank rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Sickos like me

Like most the books I bloody read, I wished I'd reviewed it immediately afterwards, but hey, I wasn't even on this site. But it must say something that I was able to review Natsuo's precursor "Out" with no problems because it was so bleedin' phenomenal. This too, is a great albeit flawed read. The narrative is not as clean - intentionally as I recall and when it works it's wonderful, when it doesn't it makes you yearn for the 5th star that could have been.

One other issue - without revealing any...more

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Feb 18, 2009 Isabelle rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

While I had loved "Out", I was interested but certainly not enthralled by "Grotesque".
Through recollections, confessions and diaries, we follow the destinies of 4 Japanese girls who meet in an exclusive Junior High School and drift apart through adulthood only to be reunited in the end through a trail of murders and sexual crimes. While one of those girls, the most brilliant and driven, gravitates towards terrorism and finds redemption through love, the other three, all of them misfits in their...more

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Jul 01, 2008 Izlinda rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: foreign-translated-lit, mystery-crime, psychology, society-culture

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I don't think I will be able to clearly articulate how I feel about it. I put the books on my shelves of "Psychology," "Mystery-Crime," "Foreign/translated lit" and "Society/Culture" because it does encompass all this, even as a work of fiction. Or perhaps especially as a work of fiction. This book is told through first-person narratives. There's the initial unnamed narrator who is half Japanese-half Swiss. This story takes place in Japan, though some characters look to their past to events in C...more I don't think I will be able to clearly articulate how I feel about it. I put the books on my shelves of "Psychology," "Mystery-Crime," "Foreign/translated lit" and "Society/Culture" because it does encompass all this, even as a work of fiction. Or perhaps especially as a work of fiction. This book is told through first-person narratives. There's the initial unnamed narrator who is half Japanese-half Swiss. This story takes place in Japan, though some characters look to their past to events in China or Switzerland. Her younger sister, Yuriko, is "monstrously beautiful." There's also Kazue Sato, a classmate of the first narrator (UN for "unnamed narrator") in Q High School for Young Women, which is a competitive high school. It turns out Yuriko and Kazue are both murdered after becoming prostitutes, and about twenty years after they were all in Q High School for Young Women. The story is told through UN's narration, as though she's speaking to us, Yuriko's journal (after her death), the accused man's writings of his "crimes" and Kazue's own journals (after her death). All the journals were given to UN after the murders and part of her "showing" to "us" what she knows. There are other characters who influence the plot, as well.

It is a bizarre book, in a good way. At first, going through UN's part of the story I was impressed by how unflinchingly honest she was about herself, even if she was manipulative and malicious. She made no excuse for it. However, as time went on, I started to doubt whether UN was as self-aware or truthful as she seemed to be. The characters become more desperate, pathetic and chilling. It also made me wonder who I was most alike, if anybody. I have no idea.

This book belongs on the “Psychology” shelf because it really does make one try to find the motives behind the characters’ actions and ponder one own’s morality, as a review states. Or perhaps not one’s morality, but what morality is in the first place. Where the line is drawn, if a line can be drawn in the first place. The characters can be seen as completely out of touch with reality, or too principled they can’t compromise on anything or frightening. Characters either seem unable to see past what they’re born into and spend so much time yearning for what they wish could be they fall to really low depths, or they aspire so hard to be what they may not be able to achieve they fall, too. I don’t know who to believe or what to believe, sometimes.

“Society/Culture” because it draws a lot from Japanese and Chinese society to explain why/how the characters are like. The competitiveness and elite-ness in the Q High School for Young Women makes me glad I never attended such a place. The High School is part of the entire Q system, where one can join from elementary school and go all the way up to university. Those who have joined since elementary are part of the “insiders” circle and those who just join in High School are seem as “uncool” and can never be part of the “insiders” circle, though they can be “orbiters.” Some girls try so hard to fit in, or lie where they live so they can seem more affluent. Then there’s how things “work” in the workplace. And women’s role in society and how to hold “power.” A lot of things I don’t agree with, some I do sometimes.

“Mystery-Crime” because it is what the story starts with – two murders years apart. That is how we are introduced to UN. Even at the end I’m unclear about who killed one of the women.

“Foreign/Translated lit” because it is work of Japanese by Natsuo Kirino translated into English by Rebecca Copeland.

I gave this book 5-stars because it is thought-provoking and well-written/well-translated. :P It’s probably not one I would reread in a moment of vulnerability/low self-esteem but a book I can’t forget ever.
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Mar 25, 2008 David Rim rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I loved Kirino's "Out," so when I saw this at the bookstore, I grabbed it immediately.

"Grotesque" is an apt title. Essentially, "Grotesque" is about hatred and confusion, richly illustrated with stories ranging from murder to incest -- I imagine Kirino's angry finger pointing at some of society's most obvious ills (mass consumerism, the idolotry of youth, pointless competition, misogyny.) All of which lead to her characters' transformations into grotesque monstrosities.

However, while indeed ent...more

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Jun 26, 2008 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-in-translation

I loved the author's earlier book, OUT, an incredibly compelling, as well as impossibly horrific & beautiful (if a bit too wild and implausible at the very end), novel. GROTESQUE is not as masterful although it is compelling in its own way. In this novel, Natsuo Kirino also deals with the lives of women in contemporary Japanese society, here through the lens of a cut-throat competitive educational system, the Q High School for Young Women. The principal narrator is a "half" (only half-Japane...more

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Mar 24, 2008 Mike Philbin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people who don't expect narrative arc

A Testimony Of Several.

English-language marketing folk always get it wrong with Japanese fiction. They always have to call it a 'murder mystery' or a 'thriller', respectively describing the 'genre' of Kirino's two books in English GROTESUQUE and OUT.

Well, they may have been closer with OUT, it was thrilling-ish but a better term might have been the invented sub-genre RELENTLESS.

And that's how this latest book is. Though for different reasons. Talk about losing your way... it was okay when she ta...more

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Oct 14, 2010 Marvin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

a complex tale of class discrimination and sexual inequality. Natsuo Kirino may be the most socially astute of the current Japanese writers. She criticizes many things about Japanese culture; the role of women, the unfairness of the competitive school system, among others. She writes how this dehumanizes the participant, especially women. She does this in a harrowing tale of three women told by the older sister of a murdered prostitute. The story proceeds Rashomon style, narrated by the sister b...more

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Mar 23, 2008 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2008, books-i-own

This book didn't hook me as completely as Kirino's first English-translated book, Out. She's a masterful writer, though, so I was eventually pulled in. I love the way she weaves together her stories, taking you from one character to the next, leaving you wanting more in one part and then giving it to you later on (usually from the perspective of another character, which only makes it more interesting).

I related to a lot in this book. The bitterness of Yuriko's older sister, growing up as the ugl...more

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Aug 22, 2007 Maggie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is a like a train wreck. Each character is more broken, more vindictive, more reprehensible than the next, and yet you cannot turn away. Set in contemporary Japan, this is the story of four women linked by blood, by a prestigious school system, and by prostitution. Though appearing exceptionally beautiful or intelligent on the outside, each harbors their own particular perversion, their own inner malice or ugliness that they use as a form of armor from an increasingly disappointing wor...more

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Nov 23, 2008 C(h)ristine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Spotted this book at a Borders in Ann Arbor, remembered that Junot Diaz once said he liked a novel by Kirino, and bought it. Six months later, I crack open the book…

I’m not sure why this book was as long as it is–the storyline itself is not that epic or groundbreaking, even though the premise (the narrator’s sister and high school classmate are murdered…) is intriguing. And the ending? Total let down.

But but but! The book did take risks in other areas, to great success. The characters are fantas...more

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Feb 22, 2013 Nexa rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Questo libro mi ha dato delle difficoltà, ho impiegato un tempo abnorme per terminarlo.
Forse mi aspettavo qualcosa di diverso, ma non credo che si possa ridurre tutto a delle aspettative disilluse. Viene venduto come un thriller ma non lo è, manca completamente di pathos, la storia non è incalzante anzi è molto lenta, col rischio di far addormentare il lettore a tratti. L'autore intreccia le storie con una tristezza, un'ineluttabilità decadente macchiata di rabbia, racconta storie a sè che solo...more

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Dec 22, 2012 Kay rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, japan, crime, feminist

Just finished reading this today and am still reeling from the story that centers on the lives of four women who once went to school together and two of whom are related. The main narrated voice is unnamed except by her relationship to Yuriko, her younger sister and murdered prostitute whose unnatural beauty has defined her life. Yuriko has a voice via her diaries, as does Kazue a classmate who met the same fate in the same profession.
I was really impressed by Kirino's first translated novel 'Ou...more

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Sep 09, 2012 Gerald Kinro rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is…well, grotesque. I picked it up because I like Japanese mysteries and because the author’s and my surnames are like misspellings of one another.
The bodies of two prostitutes are found strangled at different times in Tokyo. The author takes the reader back to their years in an elite intermediate school and lets the reader trace their ascendance into prostitution and their final death. The themes are common ones even in America today—bullying, need for acceptance, the power of physic...more

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Jan 18, 2012 Alkatraz rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: asian

This is the first novel by this author that I have read and I was left feeling unsure about the book as a whole. Written in Japanese surrealist style, the novel follows one woman through her life and how she reacts to a world where she is merely average yet her younger sister is a monstrous beauty. The focus is on the time spent in high school and then middle age.

When her sister and a school mate are both murdered, the unnamed protagonist goes back through her memory and explores the past they a...more

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Dec 31, 2011 Kristin rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The book was difficult to put down, but not fulfilling. On the plus side, it is filled with sex and prostitution. On the negative side,it is brutally bitter. The New York Times review called the incessant and intense hatred of the narrator was like staring too long at an unshaded lightbulb.

The story is about two women who were school mates at a prestigious all-girl's high school. Both later become prostitutes and are murdered. The story is narrated by the younger sister of one of the women as we...more

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Dec 05, 2011 Ira syarif rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Natsuo Kirino mungkin seorang feminis atau entahlah pendukung gerakan feminis atau bagaimana. Themanya mungkin biasa-biasa saja tentang pelacur yang mati dibunuh. tapi kemampuan narasi berceritanya patut diacungi jempol.

Hampir semua tokoh di dalam novelnya ini adalah orang-orang yang tidak jujur dengan dirinya sendiri. Pembaca jadi bingung mana yang benar-benar real dan mana yang hanya hayalan. setiap tokohnya ingin diterima pembaca sebagai orang baik-baik bagaimanapun busuknya mereka terutama t...more

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Aug 08, 2011 Rosemary rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Told through a series of memories, letters, confessions and diaries - that you feel you really shouldn't be looking at - this book lives up to its name; Grotesque.

Natsuo Kirino has a gift at making you enter each one of the character's minds, whether you want to or not! I couldn't put it down, it feels like you are being told the juiciest gossip story ever, along the lines of 'you never guess what happened to them?!' - but much, much darker and more disturbing of course.

The novel doesn't let up...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Derek Baldwin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A series of very unreliable narrators describe how a Chinese man living illegally in Tokyo becomes fatally intertwined with two women working as prostitutes.

This has some very nice touches but the idea of using different narrative techniques means that the momentum shifts at times that are not always in the best interests of the story. (That's a polite way of saying that some of the sections dragged!)

The best sections, early on, described the schooldays of most of the principal characters and w...more

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Jan 20, 2011 Clint rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

I was going to give this book 2 stars until about halfway through it because the characters were completely unbelievable in their complexity (junior high students don't talk like that to each other, decadent French authors do), and there was something really wrong with the main character directly addressing the reader, and there was something really wrong with the translation. I can't imagine the author writing in Jap for a Jap audience would need to explain what natto is. However, by about half...more

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Jan 16, 2011 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I do my laundry at the neighboring apartment complex, and someone had left a stack books next to the washers with a sign reading "Free." I picked up this book as I thought it might be some sort of murder mystery.

Instead it was a "Catcher in the Rye" meets "Lolita" psychological study of four girls attending an elite academy in Tokyo. I'd hate to think that even a smidgen of this reflects the actual experience of school in Japan.

Imagine a Japanese teenage girl version of Holden Caulfield with a...more

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Aug 12, 2010 Judy rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2010

Grotesque is an exploration of many things. Japanese society, coming of age and also the yearnings / struggles of privileged women. I should probably mention that I read the Chinese translation of this book, and also that I didn't end up finishing the book.

I thought the book was long, drawn out and tedious. The book revolves around a girl of mixed heritage (Yuriko) who is beautiful to the point of unnatural, like she should not even exist on this earth. The girl's older sister is the unnamed na...more

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Jan 04, 2010 Sophia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people who are not bothered by incest

Shelves: japan, prostitute, 2010

Grotesque is a riveting, razor-sharp indictment of societal and gender roles in modern Japan delivered through three vivid first-hand accounts. Two aging streetwalkers are brutally murdered; they were both students at the prestigious Q High School for Young Women in Tokyo. Stitched together by their diaries, depositions and the "overall" narrator--the plain, unnamed older sister of the once monstrously beautiful prostitute Yuriko--Natsuo Kirino sheds light on a universe of painful solitude, dark...more

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Aug 30, 2009 Brian Shevory rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A very strange and disturbing book, but it was a book that I couldn't put down. In some ways, it was similar to Steinbeck's East of Eden. There is a struggle between two siblings for the attention of parents and later for success in the world. However, the siblings are sisters and their concerns are more with their attractiveness, which I think Kirino is aiming to criticize about the treatment of Japanese women. Kirino uses multiple perspectives to tell her story, much like Out. However, unlike...more

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Aug 09, 2009 emily rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

at least it's ambitious.

along with one enormously unreliable narrator, we also get significant sections written by (at least) four other characters, each of whom have a different story to tell us. however, none of them are compelling enough narrators to actually make me care who's telling the truth or, more to the point, whose lies are the most interesting and least damning.

zhang's narrative is far and away the most interesting, which is hardly saying anything, since the actual narrator is almos...more

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Jul 12, 2012 Gabbo rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book really got under my skin. It is a dark, disturbing, often explicit tale of the need to be accepted in modern society and the pressures everyone faces in a class striken, layered society (here focusing on Japan).

It is divided into the journal entries of Yuriko (a beautiful woman whose meaning in life is to be appreciated for her beauty, hence her decent in prostitution)and Kazue (a hard working career who moonlights as a prostitute at night). The journal entries are collected together b...more

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May 13, 2012 Mircalla64 (free Liu Xiaobo) rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: giappone

la sessualità come strumento di deriva morale

Grotesque è il terzo romanzo di Natsuo Kirino pubblicato in Italia, curiosamente il più famoso, anche se nettamente inferiore al precedente e più compatto Morbide Guance

Il tema è la deriva interiore e il sesso come strumento di differenziazione, tema molto trattato nel cinema giapponese, in prevalenza dal regista Sono Sion che, in Guilty of Romance, qua la mia rece,
http://www.cinemalia.it/thriller/guil...
tratta una storia molto simile a questa

la...more la sessualità come strumento di deriva morale

Grotesque è il terzo romanzo di Natsuo Kirino pubblicato in Italia, curiosamente il più famoso, anche se nettamente inferiore al precedente e più compatto Morbide Guance

Il tema è la deriva interiore e il sesso come strumento di differenziazione, tema molto trattato nel cinema giapponese, in prevalenza dal regista Sono Sion che, in Guilty of Romance, qua la mia rece,
http://www.cinemalia.it/thriller/guil...
tratta una storia molto simile a questa

la narrazione è qui meno intensa di Le Quattro Casalinghe di Tokyo e meno compatta che in Real World, il risultato è una prosa a tratti prolissa e sfilacciata, e una certa stanchezza complessiva per la ridondanza del tema, trattato dall'ottica di tutte le protagoniste

la morte delle due donne che apre le danze è in realtà il pretesto per un racconto impietoso della degradazione morale e della prostituzione, intesa come rifugio contro la normalità e gradino ultimo a cui può scendere una donna giapponese
il divario tra le scelte delle protagoniste e la normalità sociale, rappresentata dal ruolo lavorativo o familiare, è dapprima solo insinuato e successivamente urlato nel racconto corale di due donne morte e della sorella di una di loro, cui fa da contraltare l'ottica di Zhang, accusato degli omicidi, che rappresenta l'elemento degradante in sè...

anche in Real World l'autrice userà il grimaldello della fuga dalla normalità, ma con risultati assai più vividi e meno moralmente pesanti per le protagoniste, anche in questo caso delle donne, in verità delle giovani alle soglie dell'età in cui devono scegliere il loro futuro, ed è curioso come l'autrice sembri preferire le scelte devianti come indice di una differenziazione, in opposizione alla normalità che in Natsuo Kirino equivale sempre all'appiattimento
nel complesso una notevole prova generale per quello che poi viene raccontato in meno pagine e con più passione nel successivo Real World e reso iperbolico ed eccessivo in L'Isola dei naufraghi...

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About Natsuo Kirino

NATSUO KIRINO, born in 1951 in Kanazawa (Ishikawa Prefecture) was an active and spirited child brought up between her two brothers, one being six years older and the other five years younger than her. Kirino's father, being an architect, took the family to many cities, and Kirino spent her youth in Sendai, Sapporo, and finally settled in Tokyo when she was fourteen, which is where she has been res...more

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Trivia About Grotesque

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Quotes from Grotesque

“In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.” — 29 people liked it

“For a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.” — 25 people liked it

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Grotesque

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