| julie
brock
A review of the novel Grotesque,
by Natsuo Kirino, Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 2007. 480 pages
The award-winning Japanese writer Natsuo Kirino is known for
her genre-defying books combining crime novel, feminist literature,
psychological thriller, and pulp fiction into a single cohesive
piece that leaves readers reeling and booksellers struggling
to categorize.
Grotesque, Kirino’s second book translated
into English, is the story of two sisters born to a Swiss
man and a Japanese woman. As “half” Japanese,
the girls are automatically outsiders in the homogeneous society
of Japan. Furthermore, the younger daughter, Yuriko, is a
stunning beauty. The older daughter, who is also the novel’s
nameless narrator, is thoroughly bitter that she must live
in the shadow of her beautiful sister. Not only is the narrator
half, therefore unlike her Japanese peers, but she is also
quite plain-looking compared to Yuriko. Yuriko’s gruesome
death changes her sister’s life, though not in the way
one might expect.
The sisters attend the Q School for Young Women, where the
motto is teaching students “self-sufficiency and a strong
sense of self-awareness.” In reality, students learn
to derive their self-worth entirely from their standing in
the eyes of others. Competition at the school is cutthroat,
and the established clique keeps strict tabs on the social
order. New kids, poor kids, and ugly kids are the bottom of
the social barrel at Q School. There are no dumb kids at the
school because it requires high scores on entrance exams,
but the kids with less than perfect grades are also outcasts.
A classmate at Q School, Kazue, is particularly reviled for
trying too hard to be cool. Kazue’s fate is closely
linked to that of both sisters, and her status as a loser
is the one issue on which they agree. She wears obviously
fake eyelashes to make her eyes look less Asian and stitches
a trendy logo onto her knee socks to hide that they are a
generic brand. As an adult, Kazue is crippled by her lack
of self-awareness and her dependence on other people for reassurance
that she is a good person. She suffers from delusions and
anorexia. “I was trimmer now than ever,” she says
after years of starving herself. “The lighter I grew,
the happier I felt. At this rate I was just going to melt
away into thin air.”
Much of the novel is written in epistolary form, using letters,
diaries, and a court transcript to tell the story. This structure
may sound uninteresting, since it removes the guesswork involved
in the typical crime novel; however, Grotesque is
no crime novel, and its revelations do not unfurl into a tidy
conclusion. The letters and diaries reveal the motivation
behind the characters’ actions in a way the narrator
cannot. Since she is not omniscient, she can tell us only
what she knows, or what she wants us to know.
The letters and diaries also permit the characters to tell
conflicting stories, which humanizes them. Real people, after
all, forget, embellish, and tell outright lies. Another advantage
of the epistolary form is that it allows Kirino to traverse
more psychological territory than she would otherwise be able
to fit into a single novel.
One cannot begin reading a novel called Grotesque
without wondering just what, or who, is being described. The
cast of characters supports more than one suspect. The narrator
is an obvious one. Inspired by her jealousy of her sister’s
looks, the narrator spends her life cultivating maliciousness
like a rose garden. In a prehistoric sea, she says she would
be the “Hallucigenia, the thing that crawls through
the mud of the ocean floor covered in seven sets of quills.”
Her former classmate Mitsuru agrees with the narrator’s
self assessment: “If you are reborn, it’ll be
as some bug that crawls through the dirt, she says, later
adding that “you’ve been warped for as long as
I can remember.”
When Yuriko, who has become a prostitute, is murdered by a
john, the narrator feels no anguish. Instead, she explains
that “Yuriko had been a monster all her life; it was
only natural that her death would be unusual…Fortune
may shine brightly on a woman like that, but the shadow is
cast long and dark. It is inevitable that misfortune would
come eventually.”
As dreadful as the narrator sounds, her intensity is at least
matched by the cruelty and greed of the other characters.
There is an incestuous murderer, a couple of mentally unhinged
prostitutes, a religious cult member whose terrorist acts
have killed innocent bystanders, a woman who buys men and
keeps them like slaves. The scarcity of human kindness is
so clear that one wonders whether the title refers to something
greater than the characters themselves.
Characters do their part to support this theory, consistently
referring to their dissatisfaction with the world and their
lot in it. No one in the novel, it seems, feels he or she
has been born rich, thin, or smart enough. On a train overcrowded
with poor Chinese hoping for better lives in the city, a middle-class
woman peels a tangerine. “…the sweet citrus smell
suffused the train compartment. Oh, that scent!…[it]
defined the difference between the have and have-nots…enough
to drive a person crazy, disrupt his life.”
This obsession with having more—whether more is respect,
money, or beauty— is a theme. Based on her decades of
experience as a prostitute, Yuriko advises Kazue, “…if
it’s the perfect life you want, best not to be born
a woman.” Except for Yuriko, who seems to be from another
world altogether, the women become obsessed with achieving
excellence as girls at the Q School, and this obsession stays
with them their entire lives. The adult Kazue chants to herself:
“I want to win. I want to win. I want to win. I want
to be number one. I want to be respected…I want people
to say, What an awesome employee Kazue Sato is. So glad we
hired her!” So they know that she is an intelligent
woman, she shows her business card to the men who hire her
for sex.
The novel may seem to say that you should not try too hard
to achieve success, since the two women who do try hard—
Kazue and the narrator— both come to an unhappy end.
Kazue is murdered and the narrator comes mentally undone.
But this conclusion is ruled out by the fact that Yuriko,
who never exerts herself at anything but sex, also winds up
dead at the hands of a murderer. The more likely implication
is that the characters’ problems are external. The desire
to be better than one’s peers supersedes a person’s
drive for personal fulfillment; therefore, in a highly competitive
environment, people substitute social status for true satisfaction
with their lives.
One character seems to understand the problem, and this character
may express the author’s dissatisfaction with the competitive
aspects of Japanese society. As the principal and biology
professor at the Q School, Takashi firmly believes in the
school’s mission. In his old age, though, while observing
beetles in the woods, he realizes that the school was like
a social experiment. When the population of a society grows
without a commensurate growth in the food supply, “fierce
competition will ensue among the population…Eventually
this has an impact on the development, formation, and physiology
of the organism…” Mutations form “that [are]
clearly the result of the intensification of a sense of individuation.”
Though his conclusion translates into awkward English, Takashi’s
point is that the girls in the school compete for the same
rewards. Eventually, the ruthless competition takes a toll
by causing “mutations”—women like Kazue,
Yuriko, and the narrator, for whom competition is destruction.
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