Grotesque

Natsuo Kirino has been publishing books in Japan since 1984, but she only made her American debut in 2003 with the thriller Out (Vertical). Helped by a potboiler mix of yakuza brutes and hardened female characters, Out became a cult hit. But readers expecting Out 2 are in for a shock: Even the earlier book’s bleak streak cannot prepare one for the explosion of nihilism that is the aptly named Grotesque. Everything in it revolves around manipulation, lies, abuse and bullying.

With a rotating cast of narrators—who offer sometimes contradictory takes on the same events—Grotesque follows the intertwined lives of three classmates at the elite Q High School for Young Women: Kazue, Yuriko and Yuriko’s unnamed older sister. Despite being groomed for good careers, or at least good marriages, Yuriko and Kazue become prostitutes and get murdered—possibly by the same lowly Chinese immigrant. Meanwhile, Yuriko’s sister lives a mediocre existence almost entirely defined by festering resentment—of her wealthier classmates, of her Swiss father, of her work colleagues and especially of Yuriko’s outlandish beauty.

Grotesque is relentlessly one-note, but the novel almost makes up for its middling literary quality with a raging indictment of an entire society. Kirino’s description of female alienation and self-destructiveness in contemporary Japan is chilling: The country she describes embraces survival of the fittest as an organizing principle (the sister is obsessed with breeding and Darwinian evolution), where women live in a state of constant competition with each other. Japan, Kirino seems to say, offers them only two options: Lose or don’t win. — Elisabeth Vincentelli