The Real World (Natsuo Kirino)
Rating: 
In Japan, Natsuo Kirino is a big name. She’s at the forefront of a relatively recent wave of female detective-fiction authors, a prolific novelist and the winner of multiple literary awards.
In 2005, Random House did U.S. readers a favor and released a translated version of Out, a dark, suspenseful tale of four women who work together on the night shift. When one of them accidentally kills her abusive husband, they band together to dispose of the body…and soon come up with a plan to make money by doing it professionally. Darkly comic, twistedly feminist and downright disturbing, Out was a revelation for American lovers of dark fiction.
Grotesque was released the next year. Kirino’s story of a jealous woman and her beautiful sister who is murdered is multilayered, using rotating first-person points-of-view to weave a bizarre, dysfunctional tapestry full of deception.
Random House will be obliging us yet again this July with the release of a third novel by Kirino, The Real World.
The novel opens with high school senior Toshiko, who is spending a sweltering summer break attending cram school. Bored with life, distrustful of adults, and jaded by the consumerist culture thrust upon her every day, Toshi feels she has only survived this long thanks to her three close friends, Terauchi, Yuzan and Kirarin.
Tokshi’s family knows little about their isolated next-door neighbors, but she has christened their sullen, unfriendly son Worm. One morning Toshi hears a crash from next door and runs into Worm leaving the house; later her bike and cell phone are stolen and even later she learns Worm’s mother has been murdered. She quickly puts the pieces together, but because she views the world as an eternal battle between teenagers and adults, she doesn’t tell the police what she witnessed, giving Worm a chance to escape.
She discovers Worm has been calling her friends, who are in her cell phone contacts, and has charmed Yuzan and Kirarin into long conversations, about which they are vague. Worm finally returns Toshi’s stuff, but by then Yuzan has decided to help him elude the police. The tomboy of the group, Yuzan is a troubled girl still mourning the death of her mother years before and desperate to hide her homosexuality from her friends. In Worm she sees a kindred spirit.
Kirarin is intrigued by the bad boy image she has created of Worm in her mind, and agrees to meet him and travel with him a while. Kirarin is sweet, eternally cheerful, and secretly promiscuous. Terauchi, the philosophical member of the group, has the least contact with him, but in the end it may be her decisions that drive the story to its tragic conclusion.
The first thing most readers will notice is that The Real World is a good deal shorter than either Out or Grotesque. This isn’t a problem, as the story it tells doesn’t require length. Each of the characters (Worm, Kirarin, Yuzan, Terauchi and Toshiko ) are given their own chapters in which to explain their motivations in first person; Kirino used the same device in Grotesque. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, and it works well in The Real World, as the story is about modern Japanese teenagers, and presenting the plot in this sound-bite format, overlapping timelines and using varied voices, seems not only to represent the fleeting nature of their generation’s attention span, but also to appeal to it.
Out of the Kirino novels translated into English, The Real World is undoubtedly the least of the three. It is ultimately unsatisfying, not due to any fault in Kirino’s characterizations, but in the fact that the five point-of-view characters are too well-drawn- each of the teenagers explains everything about themselves (their history, influences, and world views)- with brutal, sometimes unbelievable, honesty. In contrast, the characters in Grotesque are all liars; picking the truth out of their narratives is half the fun of reading the book. It almost feels as if Kirino was being sloppy and a little lazy here; too tired, perhaps, to create another complex web of deceit and truth. It was simply easier to just shove the entire story at the reader all at once.
Probably the greatest strength of The Real World is its unpredictability, a Kirino trademark; the truncated, violent ending will likely surprise most readers, but it doesn’t feel out of place.
Western readers may find themselves running to the Internet to look up some of Kirino’s references to Japanese pop culture and society; it’s educational and fun for Japanophiles, and it fits perfectly with her characters, who have grown up in one of the most commercialized cities in the world, Tokyo.
The Real World, despite being one of Kirino’s lesser works, is a brief, entertaining read. Those with darker interests than chick lit may want to take a copy to the beach this summer.
Details
Publisher: Random House
Author: Natsuo Kirino
Pages: 224
Format: Book (hardcover)
MSRP: $23.95
Date of Publication: 7/15/2008
Buy:
http://www.amazon.com/Real-World-Natsuo-Kirino/dp/0307267571/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211640909&sr=8-1
Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natsuo_Kirino
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