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Grotesque

Author: Natsuo Kirino
Publisher: The Harvill Press
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

13 reviews
Sales Rank: 86128

Media: Hardcover
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.8

ISBN: 1843432706
EAN: 9781843432708
ASIN: 1843432706

Publication Date: February 1, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new book dispatched from stock in the UK

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - Grotesque
•	Paperback - Grotesque (Vintage International)
•	Paperback - Grotesque

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Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Deeply distubing , resentment premeates from cover to cover February 9, 2008
This book it not your typical crime novel, it is the narrated by a deeply disturbed and malicious woman who seemed to have filled herself with hate and jealousy against all in her life. It is a dark, disturbing, and explicit. It is about the need to be accepted and the pressures everyone faces in a class structured society in Japan.
The book is broken down into a narration,two journals and statement.
Yuriko an alien like beautiful woman whose meaning in life is to get everything she wants form her beauty.
Kazue a hard working career woman who moonlights as a prostitute at night after a life changing event.
Zhang a psychopathic liar, killer and manipulator.
If you love Japanese culture this book shows you the darker side that is not really know by westerners and its detailed views of family, school, and employment.It is an intense, social examination, which looks at everything from prostitution, gender in society, social status, immigrants, and poverty.
Resentment permeates from cover to cover.

5 out of 5 stars

Please translate more of Natsuo kirino's books asap December 7, 2007
If ever there was a book about the truth of prostitution in it's true and gritty reality this must be it. Forget about 'Pretty woman and Belle de Jour' with their glamourised and glossy images this is much more likely to be the real, and very mentally disturbing thing.

2 women become prostitutes for their own sad reasons of maybe wanting to be wanted, and end up dead - killed by their clients. The sister of one of the victims, the poor plain, bitter, overlooked one who is still a virgin at 40 years compiles the musings of the various people connected to the crime. The 2 mursered women, the suspect - a Chinese immigrant, herself, giving the background of the lives of the murdered women and a kindly teacher from the snobbish classist elite school they all attended. It all evokes a complicated background made so much worse by the hellish elitism of the 'Q' school with it's snobbish class ridden structure, maybe the school is a microcosm of the whole of Japanese society, I dont know. I wonder myself why not one single person in the whole book has a normal relationship of any sort with anyone, whether a parent, lover, sister or friend. Is this Japanese or just for the benefit of the reader I thought?

Poor sad Kazu - one of the murder victims, seems to have got off worst despite her lifetime of hard study and work, her determination to always try her best,but she is rarely recognised for any achievement. Her looks, which are truthfully more important than anyone will admit, did let her down it seems, but she becomes the most deluded person in Tokyo seeing herself as desirable despite ridicule from one and all. From her pathetic Ralph Lauren self styled socks with their home sewn on logos, her Elizabeth eyes - apparantly a gimmick to make eyes look western, her anorexic body and bizarre make up she degrades herself totally in a pathetic effort to be someone attractive and wanted by almost anybody.

The final part of the book becomes disturbing and quite horrific as we join Kazu in the dirty,perverse and disgusting world of the street walker doing just about anything to earn a few yen. The disrespect she endures whilst probably suffering from mental illness as well as severe anorexia makes would make this quite heart rending if it were not that Kazu is depicted as quite an unpleasant person throughout the book. Still people cannot help being what they are and Kazu seems to be the result of an ultra competitive home and school, making her really very deluded.

I was disappointed at the very end but I wont spoil the story.

I love Natsuo Kirino's style - I sincerely hope that she is a feminist as the book casts aspertions at a society that values youth and beauty like so many here in the west too, then casts women aside at a surprisingly early age.

This is a fascinating and modern book which opens new doors to a very different culture, one we may not wish to dig too deep into less we find it endlessly disturbing.

4 out of 5 stars

Ambitious ,Dark and Disturbing work December 4, 2007
This is certainly a departure from her first novel, as other reviewers have noted so may not be for those who thought they were in for a similar ride they had with OUT. It is ambitious and although it is a little too long and occasionally clumsy, there are a lot of very interesting and thought provoking aspects to the work. I am not sure if it succeeds, but it is worth reading and seems to have crammed every social ill in Japan over the last 20 to 30 years...intensely competitive, soul crushing and finally perverting elitist private school education system, teenage prostitution (compensated dating),illegal imigrants, the implosion of the family structure with its concomitant anomie and many other unpleasant visions of the underbelly of modern Japanese life.

the novel is an exaggeration as expressed the title..Grotesque is a composite half beleivable narrative(s) that is twisted, obscene, a parody. None of the characters can be trusted or sympathised with (with the possible exception of the bonsai tending grandfather), they feel burnt out which by extension seems a bleak indictment of the current non-direction Japan is headed in.

It seems as if everyone and their uncle ends up prostituting themselves in one way or another..I was a tad surprised that no one seemed to notice that Zhang was also a prostitute (but for different reasons and less in control) as well as his sister...so men and women sell their asses to gain some kind of illusory freedom or control over their own doomed destinies? I am not so sure about that. the structure of the novel, multi-narrator, with different angles on the same events seen through various players eyes, in their notebooks, journals, letters is also a bit of a shaky ride and verging on a kind of Japanese version of the 70s spoof soap opera SOAP..ie..getting so post narrative that you might as well have thrown a couple of aliens in there..I am thinking of smile raising events such as Yurikos real or unreal ghostly appearance, her sapling of a son, blind Yurio with the musical talent...mmmm

The only down side about this book is that yet again, it has been AMERICANISED heavily - this seems at times a translation done on the side rather than a labour of love , its a personal bug with me but it is annoying, like runway model (AmE) for catwalk model?...there are other oddities in the translation which although technically correct are in some way 'unsuited' to the original and spoil an otherwise solid piece of literary darkness. It would be good to see a British English translation of this work with less 'yeah right s and neats and all that other candy popcorn. it did work slightly in the Q school era (80s Japan probably was like that - seen through MacDonald coloured spectacles)..but elsewhere in this long work it detracts and annoys - a bit like Shakespeare saying 'Yo Dudes wassup? Its probably a licensing or syndication thing..but more English english would be nice...and with this long novel it would help a lot..

Depressing and doomed but damn good

3 out of 5 stars

A good face for memories... November 29, 2007
With an entertainment culture `Maxed out' with blood, guts and gore, the novels of Japanese crime novelist Nastuo Kirino may prove to be true horror's last stand. With `Out', her first novel translated into English, and now `Grotesque' Kirino jousts in an arena which may prove too horrific for most to contemplate - the implicit `relationship' between victim and tormentor. Remember the uproar that still goes on to this day about the Pekinpah directed Dustin Hoffman film `Straw Dogs'? - The infamous scene where Susan George's character becomes turned on by her violators? The implication being that this would and could never happen. Kirino runs this misnomer ragged and drags it kicking and screaming through a neon-splashed Kabukicho night.

In `Grotesque' Kirino relates the tale of two prostitutes who are found murdered in a red light district of Tokyo, largely through the bitter and twisted account of the nameless older sister of one of the victims Yuriko Hirata. Yuriko was cursed to be `diabolically beautiful' and the other, Kazue Sato was a plain and desperate wannabe whose veneer of respectability eventually descended into a double life of depravity as a deluded street walker. The genesis of their paths to annihilation is traced back to the vicious caste structure of the exclusive `Q System' high school; which elevates the `right' students to glory whilst consigning the rest to social oblivion. The two girls meet years later shortly before their deaths, finding each other resigned to the promise of an early demise at the hands of (possibly) the same man.

`Grotesque' is a tale devoid of any sympathetic characters but you find yourself sympathising with the uniquely Japanese mindset which spawns this sad collection of creatures as they are seemingly mowed down by the `soft' fascism of societal expectation. A very different book from `Out', some readers may find `Grotesque' a rockier ride on account of its having been structured with myriad first person narratives, but ultimately this is a worthy `follow up' to the much lauded `Out' and a provocative extension of Kirino's themes of monstrous beauty and the violating nature of conformity. Whether an act is a song, a dance or a murder, all performance is meaningless without its audience. Encore?

1 out of 5 stars

Dreadfully disappointing October 21, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful

I loved Out. I thought it one of the most remarkable books I have read in a very long time. The characters were extremely well presented, consistent and believable. And the story was simply fabulous, from beginning to end. So I awaited Grotesque very impatiently indeed. But what a struggle this new book was to read! The story was uninteresting, the four characters uniformly dull, unbelievable and inconsistently presented, and the text full of dreadful American expressions and cliches and the most peculiar use of words I've seen in print. (What on earth does the author - or the translator - think the grossly overused word 'monster' means?!) I was at a loss to believe that the same person who wrote this clumsy and insubstantial yarn was the same person who wrote the clever and sophisticated book Out.