Grotesque

by Natsuo Kirino, Rebecca Copeland (Translator)

Tokyo prostitutes Yuriko and Kazue have been brutally murdered, their deaths leaving a wake of unanswered questions about who they were, who their murderer is, and how their lives came to this end. As their stories unfurl in an ingeniously layered narrative, coolly mediated by Yuriko’s older sister, we are taken back to their time in a prestigious girls’ high school—where a strict social hierarchy decided their fates — and follow them through the years as they struggle against rigid societal conventions.

Shedding light on the most hidden precincts of Japanese society today, Grotesque is both a psychological investigation into the female psyche and a work of noir fiction that confirms Natsuo Kirino’s electrifying gifts.

Genres: Fiction, Japan, Japanese Literature, Horror, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

NATSUO KIRINO (桐野夏生), 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 residing since. Kirino showed glimpses of her talent as a writer in her early stages—she was a child with great deal of curiosity, and also a child who could completely immerse herself in her own unique world of imagination.

After completing her law degree, Kirino worked in various fields before becoming a fictional writer; including scheduling and organizing films to be shown in a movie theater, and working as an editor and writer for a magazine publication. She got married to her present husband when she turned twenty-four, and began writing professionally, after giving birth to her daughter, at age thirty. However, it was not until Kirino was forty-one that she made her major debut. Since then, she has written thirteen full-length novels and three volumes of collective short stories, which are highly acclaimed for her intriguingly intelligent plot development and character portrayal, and her unique perspective of Japanese society after the collapse of the economic bubble.

Today, Kirino continues to enthusiastically write in a range of interesting genres. Her smash hit novel OUT (Kodansha, 1997) became the first work to be translated into English and other languages. OUT was also nominated for the 2004 MWA Edgar Allan Poe Award in the Best Novel Category, which made Kirino the first Japanese writer to be nominated for this major literary award. Her other works are now under way to be translated and published around the world.

Reviews

[Adéla Stanislavská]

Jedna ze sester je zrůdně krásná, druhá jí to závidí tak, až jí nenávidí. Která z nich je tedy zrůda? Poznáváme vypravěčku pomocí retrospektivního vyprávění.
Do poloviny knížky příběh ubíhal rychle a dobře se četl. Druhá část již není tolik svižná a zajímavá.
Kniha má být dle obálky provokativní a šokující, ale podle mě není.

[Tereza Macurová]

Taky se vám stává, že si koupíte knížku ve výprodeji jen proto, že stojí pade, dva roky vám leží netknutá v knihovně, a vy pak zjistíte, že z toho bude vaše srdeční záležitost? Zrůda se mi trefila do chuti postavami i vyprávěním. Několik lidí vypráví příběh dvou zavražděných prostitutek ze svých úhlu pohledu, které se navzájem vůbec neslučují, a zrůdní jsou nakonec všichni svým způsobem. Typickým prvkem současné asijské literatury je frustrující absence rozřešení zápletky. Hnus, sex a nenávist zaručují zábavu po celých 550 stran.

[Marcel Kupka]

Dočteno v půl třetí ráno... po několika severských detektivkách zajímavé odbočení. Jen bych byl opatrný v tvrzení, že jde o "detektivku". Detektivka to není. Ale čte se to náramně.