grotesque
Posted by Gordon on September 13, 2009
My preferred cover
With two matter-of-fact murders of prostitutes and a mother’s suicide Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque is sold as a crime novel, at least in English, but she’s much more interested in crimes committed by families, and the Japanese education and class systems, as the more visceral attacks on human bodies.
The narrator – unrelentingly bitter, and unrelentingly unreliable – recalls only a few moments in her 40 odd years where she was happy for even an instant, and all but one of those celebrate nothing more than the cultivation of her single special skill, to manipulate.
She, and it seems most of Japan, is obsessed by the unfair power of beauty, realised for the purpose of the novel in the form of her sister, Yukiro, half Swiss, half Japanese. Our narrator shares these genes, perhaps, but not the resulting astonishing outward appearance. At around 11 years old she is forced to accept the power and disconcert of this creepy, awe-inspiring beauty. She decides her sister is a monster to be shunned, fled from, locked out of her life.
But slowly the reader is lead to suspect that the narrator is good at seeing monsters.
The cover blurb suggests that Yukiro and a high school classmate of the narrator later choose prostitution as a form of power. If so their choice – if ever that – is given declining rewards in a beauty-obsessed society.
[This is a post that ran out of puff .. there's a good review here]
