In fact, Toshi claims that “the sense of danger we all feel is something my mother can’t comprehend”. What emerges is a dark study of teenage alienation in modern day Japan. Similarly, they also have secret identities they are hiding from each other: Toshi calls herself Ninna to protect herself from the marketers and scammers Terauchi pretends to be simple when she’s actually an abstract, intellectual, thinker Yuzan is a lesbian and Kirarin, the “cute, cheerful, a well brought-up, proper young girl”, is sexually experienced and has other friends outside of the four. The quartet of girls are all friends from school, and each has different reasons and motivations for helping Worm. Each of the five characters take turns in narrating the story so that it reads like a collection of private diaries, lending the story a voyeuristic feel. Instead, the novel is largely a psychological study of the murderer and the four teenage girls who band together to protect him. This slim volume is an unusual read about a young, “stoop-shouldered boy” dubbed “Worm” who murders his mother and then goes on the run. I seemed to have missed Grotesque when the English translation was published in 2007, and jumped ahead to the next one, the recently translated Real World, which was originally published in Japan as Riaru Warudo in 2003.
Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.īack in 2005, I read Natsuo Kirino’s Out as part of the online reading group I used to host on this blog. It was a dark and disturbing crime thriller told from the murderers’ point of view, and while quite gruesome in places, it did mark Kirino out as a brilliant writer and I made a mental note to read more of her work as soon as it was translated into English. Fiction – paperback Vintage 208 pages 2007.
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