Grotesque: A Thriller

I was so annoyed and disgusted by the people and the petty lives they led. I did check out the reviews and I figured it would be weird enough and I would like it. Waste of money.

Once you start you won’t be able to get this book out of your head. At times it may seem lacking, but once you finish the book the story stays with your forever and you can’t wait for the next time you (re)read it!

I bought this book without reading what it is about. Just checked out the genre it was and bought it. I thought it was a murder mystery at first, and bOy oh boY was I wronG. This book is deeply psychological, the murder moves to the background and now you are facing the characters related to the people involved in the murder case and not the case. I dropped the book because it went against my expectations, it took me a few months to finish and skipped some of that confession part, but I really liked it once I figured out what the book is about and the messages in it.

I read and loved OUT by Natsuo Kirino, so I felt like it was only natural for me to run out and buy GROTESQUE. I was not disappointed in any way--this reading experience has been both dark and illuminating. Each character (Yuriko, Miss Hirata, Kazue, and Zhang) has a different sort of struggle and a different sort of perversion, and yet they are connected by the fact that they are all outsiders, prostituting themselves in one way or another. In many ways I felt that I knew these characters, especially Kazue, whose harrowing experiences are at once completely beyond anything I have ever experienced and, strangely, very familiar. I certainly don't think this book is meant to be enjoyed by everyone, but I would recommend it all the same, if only for people to get a sense of what the men and women who have "slipped through the cracks" must endure, especially in a country like Japan, which values homogeneousness. My main issue with this book is: it's been CENSORED. I can't say how angry I was when I found this out--after slogging through over 500 pages of material, I found out that a portion at the end has been cut out. WHY? This book is absolutely teeming with difficult, ugly images--and GOOD, because that's what makes it compelling. Part of this book's fundamental appeal is that it explores the rejected underbelly of Japanese society, and yet the publisher decided that it would be best to clean it up and cut out portions so as not to offend American sensibilities. Cowards. How shameful. I feel like I've been ripped off. From what I understand, the part in question dealt with the prostitution of underage males. I don't know anything more than that. Kirino is one of my favorite authors. I know that GROTESQUE was censored because marketers wanted it to have a broader appeal, but... seriously, what a waste.

Could not put this one down. A dense psycological thriller, filled with thought provoking social commentary. I wish more of her books were translated.

This compulsively readable book grabbed my attention from the very first page when the narrator confessed a seething hatred for her unspeakably beautiful sister. Kirino shows exactly what kind of a curse striking beauty can be for a woman in the same way that ugliness or ordinary features work against women. She provides a scathing indictment of the highly competitive nature of Japanese female schools as well as the workplace and introduces a number of self-loathing individuals whose lives appear to be full of promise when they're young but in fact, their fate has been sealed early on. Male-female relationships are portrayed as a form of combat; at one point, Kirino says that in order to decay, plants need water and that in the case of women, "men are the water." Ouch! Cruelty, competition and class are the big issues in this book along with sex and what might make a woman choose to prostitute herself. In the end, Karino concludes that women become prostitutes because they hate other people -- a bit simplistic and dismissing a more obvious reason which is that many prostitutes, male and female alike, sell themselves simply for the money; because they're hooked on drugs or too young to get decent jobs or sexually abused and need to reenact the pattern. The ending was ambiguous and left me with some unanswered questions but nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed every single page of this beautifully written, wonderfully analytical, wildly entertaining and provocative story about a young woman who grows up with an abnormally attractive sister who she calls the monster. "The monster" eventually becomes a prostitute along with another schoolgirl known by the narrator -- 6° of separation? -- and in the end we must conclude that all of the characters are monsters: mean-spirited, self-loathing and ridiculously self absorbed. Well worth the read. Sigridmac

Although Natsuo Kirino has published sixteen books in Japan, GROTESQUE is only her second to be translated into English, following her successful first entry, OUT. Ms. Kirino's work is typically categorized as mystery novels, a genre of which I am neither a fan nor a reader. However, I happily make an exception in Ms. Kirino's case, having earlier stumbled across OUT while looking for English language books in China. Her work tacks hard toward exploration of human (especially female) psyches within the rigid cultural framework that is Japan. As a result, her two books stand as critiques of Japanese society and culture, set within a fictional framework and centered on acts of homicidal violence either conducted by women in OUT, or directed at women in GROTESQUE. At its core, GROTESQUE is a simple tale of the brutal murders of two middle-aged prostitutes, occurring slightly less than a year apart, and the man accused of killing them both. However, rather than spend most of her 467 pages on the crime or its investigation (Zhang, the accused, freely admits to murdering Yuriko), Ms. Kirino creates a complex web of characters while recounting the school-age experiences of both victims as seen through one of the victim's sisters and as recounted by journals kept by both dead women. The story passes back and forth from the present (the killer's trial) to the victims' high school days in the high pressure and high conformist Japanese school system, while a parallel thread tracks the killler's passage from poor farm villager in China to Chinese immigrant laborer in Tokyo. The unifying character in GROTESQUE is Ms. Hirata, unattractive older sister to the almost preternaturally beautiful Yuriko Hirata. Both girls were born of the same Swiss Caucasian father and Japanese mother, but where the elder sister looks like her frumpy mother, Yuriko represents in stunning fashion the "Eurasian ideal." Ms. Hirata chafes at what she believes are the inevitable debasing comparisons between herself and her sister Yuriko, becoming so resentful that she seeks to distance herself as far as possible from the princess-like Yuriko. The elder sister studies relentlessly, hoping to supplant her younger sibling's physical but empty-headed beauty with her own academic accomplishments, culminating with admission to the esteemed Q High School for Young Women and later to Q University. When her family, including Yuriko, moves to Switzerland without her (she stays behind to attend Q School and live with her incipiently senile, bonsai-growing grandfather), Ms. Hirata appears to have both her distance and her secret wish. However, her father's divorce and rapid remarriage to a much younger Turkish woman leads Yuriko to return to Japan where, lo and behold, she is accepted into the trendy, ultra chic Q School entirely based on her extraordinary beauty. The appropriately unnamed Ms. Hirata -- who would remember her name with Yuriko in the room? -- passes successfully, academicall

What a shame that this is only the second of Kirino's novels to be translated into English. I anxiously await more, as Grotesque proved to be the most psychologically intense piece of fiction I have ever read. This story of a hate-consumed woman, her younger sister, and a classmate is riddled with the concept of human beings as monsters, and with the role of females in a society that devalues them at every turn. No short review could do this brilliant book justice. Kirino's talent is so huge it is scary. One of the best of 2007, without a doubt.