Book 93: " Grotesque" by Natsuo Kirino
Saturday, November 28th, 2009 13:15![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeSet in the aftermath of the murder of two prostitutes, the story is told from the point of view of the older sister of one of the murder victims, who was also a classmate of the other victim at the prestigious Q High School twenty or so years earlier. Although the narrator is not named, which is one of my pet hates in novels, I eventually came round to thinking that it was quite apt that she is always referred to as Yuriko's sister, since that is how she has always thought of herself.
The older sister is clearly an unreliable narrator. She is self-interested, self-deceiving and amoral, and extremely inconsistent. For example when introducing her sister's journal into the tale she says, "If you promise not to believe a word of it, I'll let you see what she wrote. But you really must not believe it. It really is a complete fabrication. A number of the Chinese characters she used in the journal were written incorrectly. And then there were places where she left out characters, and others where the characters she wrote were just plain ugly or else really hard to decipher. I've rewritten these parts." So the journal can't be relied on at all. From things her school-friend Mitsuru says when they meet at the trial, it seems that she has also misrepresented her time at Q High School, projecting all her difficulties onto Kazue, while denying that they also applied to herself.
The Q school system, which emphasises self-reliance and teaches that if you work hard you will get what you want, also teaches the opposite by allowing its inner circle of rich girls who entered the system at elementary school to dominate all the school clubs and bully the girls who entered at junior high, who in their turn bully and exclude the girls who enter at high school. The ex-pupils we meet, who are now in their late thirties, show that the system doesn't work; Takashi Kijima became Yuriko's pimp in his teens and now runs an escort agency; the girls include the beautiful Yuriko, who has been a prostitute since selling herself to the boys at the Q boy's high school, Kazue, who became bulimic at school in her doomed attempts to fit in with the inner circle, and resentful at her lack of progress in her career, went on to lead a double life working as a call-girl at night, Yuriko's sister, who holds down an ordinary sort of job at the local council, has allowed her maliciousness and hatred of her unnaturally beautiful sister to rule her life, and Mitsuru, who went on to study medicine at the prestigious Toyko University and became a doctor, went on to join a religious cult and spend several several years in prison.
A very interesting book, and a good choice for the Motley Fool book club. The only thing I didn't like was the ending.
The older sister is clearly an unreliable narrator. She is self-interested, self-deceiving and amoral, and extremely inconsistent. For example when introducing her sister's journal into the tale she says, "If you promise not to believe a word of it, I'll let you see what she wrote. But you really must not believe it. It really is a complete fabrication. A number of the Chinese characters she used in the journal were written incorrectly. And then there were places where she left out characters, and others where the characters she wrote were just plain ugly or else really hard to decipher. I've rewritten these parts." So the journal can't be relied on at all. From things her school-friend Mitsuru says when they meet at the trial, it seems that she has also misrepresented her time at Q High School, projecting all her difficulties onto Kazue, while denying that they also applied to herself.
The Q school system, which emphasises self-reliance and teaches that if you work hard you will get what you want, also teaches the opposite by allowing its inner circle of rich girls who entered the system at elementary school to dominate all the school clubs and bully the girls who entered at junior high, who in their turn bully and exclude the girls who enter at high school. The ex-pupils we meet, who are now in their late thirties, show that the system doesn't work; Takashi Kijima became Yuriko's pimp in his teens and now runs an escort agency; the girls include the beautiful Yuriko, who has been a prostitute since selling herself to the boys at the Q boy's high school, Kazue, who became bulimic at school in her doomed attempts to fit in with the inner circle, and resentful at her lack of progress in her career, went on to lead a double life working as a call-girl at night, Yuriko's sister, who holds down an ordinary sort of job at the local council, has allowed her maliciousness and hatred of her unnaturally beautiful sister to rule her life, and Mitsuru, who went on to study medicine at the prestigious Toyko University and became a doctor, went on to join a religious cult and spend several several years in prison.
A very interesting book, and a good choice for the Motley Fool book club. The only thing I didn't like was the ending.
