Tangled Web UK Review February 2007
Grotesque by
Natsuo Kirino
hbk out February 07
Published by Harvill
at £17.99
The spiteful (and un-named) narrator of Grotesque is obsessed with appearances. She is one
of two sisters, both 'halves', children of a mixed race marriage, in this case between a
Japanese woman and a Swiss national of Polish descent, an importer of confectionery into
Japan. Yuriko, the younger of the two sisters by a year, is "terrifyingly beautiful"; our
narrator considers herself interesting but "perfectly ordinary". In the first chapter we learn
that Yuriko has become a prostitute and has been murdered. A year later Kazue, a fellow
pupil of the sisters – in this case intelligent, academically distinguished but also physically
thin and ungainly – has also been found murdered; she has led a double life – conscientious
employee by day, a prostitute by night. The murderer in each case is thought to be the same.
Sharing popular fascination with the case, and with unique inside knowledge of the key
female protagonists, our narrator sets out to understand just how the differing circumstances
of the two women's lives could end in such a similar fashion.
Kirino has won crime fiction prizes in her native Japan for both a mid-
career novel (Rain Falling on My Face, 1993) and Out (1997), her surprise US and UK hit.
Lately however those prizes (including the Izumi Kyoka prize for Grotesque) have come
from the more literary end of the spectrum. Not, I suspect for her language: Kirino's prose,
well served in Rebecca Copeland's fluent translation, is lively but functional. More, I would
think, for her ambition, weighty thematic material and her undoubted ability, so evident in
Out, to structure a novel for maximum effect.
For as well as the older sister's recounting of the events as she knows them, there is also a
diary that reveals the shocking truth about Yuriko's teenage years, whilst another perspective
is provided by the journals of the self-deluding Kazue. From a more neutral point of view
(while allowing Kirino an unsettling male perspective on the themes of the novel) come court
documents outlining the equally disturbing 'facts' about Zhang, the Chinese illegal immigrant
suspected of both murders.
The theme that emerges most strongly is a complex and ultimately terrifying picture of the
position of women in Japanese society. Every page seems marked by the way in which
judgments of race, class, money, accomplishment, physical appearance, even style, conspire
against women, in the family, at school and university and finally in the wider world. Men
meanwhile mostly seem peripheral, until their actions, often off-page, reveal their role in
reinforcing the status quo. The result is a bleak and sometimes unsavoury novel, not easy to
like, with almost no sympathetic characters, female or male. And, as the book moves to its
crushing conclusion, the reader is left with as many questions as
answers. Unclichéd contemporary noir at its most absorbing and relevant.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
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