Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino Review

At the moment I am enjoying rereading "Grotesque" by Natsuo Kirino. It is a compelling and disturbing book focusing on the twisted lives of a group of young women who attended "Q" an elite school/university (apparently the two can be combined in Japan) in which there is a polarisation between the super rich girls who have been there since elementary school and the hard working less privileged girls who are admitted later through their hard work. Like her previous novel "Out" it is a dark tale but with characters that appeal even less to the reader's sympathy. In the earlier novelthere was at least initially a grizzly cameraderie between the group of women factory workers as they rallied round their friend. In this novel the principle protaganist is almost entirely unsympathetic as she coldly watches and even gratuitously hastens the disintegration of those around her. She is a lonely and twisted character, deeply affected by the constant comparisons made between her and her beautiful sister Yuriko. Prostitution and murder blights the lives of the other main female characters. A friend of mine who had enjoyed "Out" was repelled by this novel seeing it as self-hating and anti-feminist. To me the novel seemed instead an angry indictment of the competitive, image obssessed society that shaped and distorted these women. The initially over-achieving character who ends by taking a bizzarre pride in the fact that she juggles being a business woman and a prostitute seems to mirror the twin expectations of  and pressures upon women in contempory society to be both beautiful and sexually appealing while at the same time be successful career women. Glossy magazines such as Cosmopolitan exhort women to not only work hard but look good, go to the gym, buy the right products, cook the right meals and have sex with an equally successful if less well groomed male in a variety of positions. The prostitute/businesswoman character who boasts of her career to sexual clients and sneers at her female colleagues for not venturing into the world of prostitution is indeed a grotesque image of someone trying to meet all the expectations thrown at the modern woman.

Another aspect of the novel that I really enjoyed was the vivid portrait of the Chinese character Zheng's life in a remote Chinese village and his epic and horrendous train journey to the big port city to find work. The novelist brings the world of a snobbish private girl's school and the world of a desperately poor immigrant to life with an equally unflinching eye.