I enjoyed Natsuo Kirino's first book OUT much better than this superficial look at the apathetic view some Japanese youth take on murder and other morals. Told in alternating chapters with a varied group of teenage girls--and one teenage boy who gets fed up with a nagging mother, so he kills her and goes on the lam. The girls sympathize with him for the most part and help him out by giving him money, a phone, a bike and even sleep with him. I just found it shallow [yes, the characters are shallow people, but the construction and execution of the novel is just as thin as the people who tell the story] and very uninteresting. I'm not opposed to a book about disaffected youth in Japan, but REAL WORLD is rather bland and feels half-baked and half-conceived and isn't effective.