- Joined
- Aug 6, 2013
- Messages
- 2,628
- Reaction score
- 5,320
I tried to post in the original thread, but was prevented from doing so by a message that informed me that the thread was too old to add responses.
Just in case some of you are still reading books and would like to share, I am reviving the thread. I would personally prefer novels by Japanese authors or novels involving Japan, but any novel is fine.
I'm not sure where I picked it up, but a few months ago I read a captivating and haunting novel by Natsuo Kirino called Grotesque. Once I started the novel, it stayed with me, even when I was not reading.
The New York Times describes the novel better than I could...
“Grotesque” is full of schoolgirls in long socks but blanchingly free of cuteness, a combination we might call Uh-Oh Kitty. Natsuo Kirino started out as a romance novelist before turning to crime fiction, which seems to suit her rather better. She has written 4 story collections and 16 novels, of which this is the second to be translated into English. The first, “Out,” was the cheerful tale of a factory worker who colludes with co-workers to murder her husband; they cut him up and distribute pieces of him around Tokyo. In “Grotesque,” she dismembers the detective novel instead, hacking off suspense, glamour, mystery and horror to leave a disconcerting stump of a book that fulfills no conventional expectations. The crime part is straightforward enough: two middle-aged prostitutes have been found strangled in apartments in central Tokyo. But the novel greets these acts with a laconic “So?” and approaches the business of crime-solving with the eye-rolling ennui of a teenager asked to do the washing-up.
The story is told by a nameless narrator, the dowdy older sister of one of the murdered women and a former schoolmate of the other. She patches together an account of all their lives, here and there including extracts from the other women’s letters and journals — at which points the plot gets denser rather than thicker, as Kirino flirts naughtily with the notion of prostitution as feminism. (“My armor during the day was a flowing cape; at night it became Superman’s cape. By day a businesswoman; by night a whore. ... I was capable of using both my brains and my body to make money. Ha!” — a declaration that might have more philosophical heft if the prostitute who makes it weren’t murdered shortly after.) The narrator’s reminiscences promise an explanation that is never really forthcoming, dragging out the pleasurable deferral of the detective story until it chafes. We learn what has happened, and to whom, and what they all thought of one another (not much). But no one ever seems to really get to grips with why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/books/review/Harrison2.t.html
And from The Japan Times
Do the suffocating pressures of Japanese society produce monsters? Does trying to live by men’s rules drive women crazy? These are two of the questions posed by Natsuo Kirino in her powerful new novel, “Grotesque.”
In her earlier mystery, titled “Out,” now available in an English translation from Kodansha International, Kirino looked at four women leading lives of quiet desperation on the fringes of Japanese society. “Grotesque” (Bungei Shunjuu, 536 pp.), on the other hand, was inspired by a 1997 murder in which the victim was a 39-year-old woman who was a researcher at Tokyo Electric Power Co. by day, and a prostitute by night.
Why would a career woman at an elite firm lead such a double life? Kirino starts exploring possible answers in one microcosm of Japanese society she calls school Q (thought to represent Keio), and the coping mechanisms of four female students there.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/cultur...sque-cuts-too-close-to-the-bone/#.Wp38iuhuZJ8
Just in case some of you are still reading books and would like to share, I am reviving the thread. I would personally prefer novels by Japanese authors or novels involving Japan, but any novel is fine.
I'm not sure where I picked it up, but a few months ago I read a captivating and haunting novel by Natsuo Kirino called Grotesque. Once I started the novel, it stayed with me, even when I was not reading.
The New York Times describes the novel better than I could...
“Grotesque” is full of schoolgirls in long socks but blanchingly free of cuteness, a combination we might call Uh-Oh Kitty. Natsuo Kirino started out as a romance novelist before turning to crime fiction, which seems to suit her rather better. She has written 4 story collections and 16 novels, of which this is the second to be translated into English. The first, “Out,” was the cheerful tale of a factory worker who colludes with co-workers to murder her husband; they cut him up and distribute pieces of him around Tokyo. In “Grotesque,” she dismembers the detective novel instead, hacking off suspense, glamour, mystery and horror to leave a disconcerting stump of a book that fulfills no conventional expectations. The crime part is straightforward enough: two middle-aged prostitutes have been found strangled in apartments in central Tokyo. But the novel greets these acts with a laconic “So?” and approaches the business of crime-solving with the eye-rolling ennui of a teenager asked to do the washing-up.
The story is told by a nameless narrator, the dowdy older sister of one of the murdered women and a former schoolmate of the other. She patches together an account of all their lives, here and there including extracts from the other women’s letters and journals — at which points the plot gets denser rather than thicker, as Kirino flirts naughtily with the notion of prostitution as feminism. (“My armor during the day was a flowing cape; at night it became Superman’s cape. By day a businesswoman; by night a whore. ... I was capable of using both my brains and my body to make money. Ha!” — a declaration that might have more philosophical heft if the prostitute who makes it weren’t murdered shortly after.) The narrator’s reminiscences promise an explanation that is never really forthcoming, dragging out the pleasurable deferral of the detective story until it chafes. We learn what has happened, and to whom, and what they all thought of one another (not much). But no one ever seems to really get to grips with why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/books/review/Harrison2.t.html
And from The Japan Times
Do the suffocating pressures of Japanese society produce monsters? Does trying to live by men’s rules drive women crazy? These are two of the questions posed by Natsuo Kirino in her powerful new novel, “Grotesque.”
In her earlier mystery, titled “Out,” now available in an English translation from Kodansha International, Kirino looked at four women leading lives of quiet desperation on the fringes of Japanese society. “Grotesque” (Bungei Shunjuu, 536 pp.), on the other hand, was inspired by a 1997 murder in which the victim was a 39-year-old woman who was a researcher at Tokyo Electric Power Co. by day, and a prostitute by night.
Why would a career woman at an elite firm lead such a double life? Kirino starts exploring possible answers in one microcosm of Japanese society she calls school Q (thought to represent Keio), and the coping mechanisms of four female students there.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/cultur...sque-cuts-too-close-to-the-bone/#.Wp38iuhuZJ8
Last edited:
