MikePadgett.com

Grotesque

— Kirino's painful critique of the enormous pressure put on Japanese youth to conform and succeed needs no advertisements.”

• Natsuo Kirino
• Harvill (2007)
• 

After I recently moaned about the commercial fetishization of Haruki Murakami‘s work, I can see this happening again with Natsuo Kirino. Kirino apparently has a back catalogue of well over twenty books at the time of writing and what Harvill pulled off with Murakami they must be feeling capable of repeating here.

Fortunately, Kirino’s brand of full-frontal brutality is neither palatable to lovelorn teenagers nor suitable prose for future A-Level lit papers. Whatever the risk, you have to hope that Rebecca Copeland is putting in the requisite overtime to deliver a succession of translations.

To call Natsuo Kirino a crime writer is like calling the Pope a priest. She is at the very least a master manipulator, but her manipulations go far beyond mere plotting. Where the darkly brilliant Out tested an honest protagonist’s willingness to hide an increasingly bloody secret from colleagues against a backdrop of banal factory work, Grotesque turns an uncomfortable stare on its readers, asking us to tease out the truth from bitter accounts of broken lives.

Two former schoolmates are found dead in Tokyo, having both been active prostitutes. We step back in time to follow the history of the strained relationship between one of the victims Yuriko and her unnamed sister, who narrates with the occasionally gleeful partiality of a strongly disaffected sibling. As the story develops, a cast of other characters joins them during the years spent within a privileged private school system.

And Kirino has much to say in criticism of an education system – and the society it feeds – that pressurizes its youth and places gross emphasis on status and academic success at all costs. Thus, where Out was remarkably and necessarily claustrophobic, Grotesque achieves with similar candour an impressively broad sweep. Such eloquent honesty has no need of merchandising.