Grotesque

 - By Natsuo Kirino

The book has a very curious introduction about a girl who wonders what her child would look like if she made out with the guy in front of her and this is what she wonders with every passing man. When I read this sentence, I had a small smile wondering what I think when I pass a guy and I realized I never gave much thought to it! I think I will make a conscious effort to make note of my first impressions from now on, though I can guarantee now, that my thought would never involve thinking of a guy romantically!!! He he, I am too faint hearted for such an adventure in my life! Surprisingly, this girl does not have a name through out the novel.

The girl speaks to me as she progresses further in rendering her story and gives a brief glimpse of her life, her family – that included her mother, father and a sister. And the bits and pieces jumble in and out of her life and the characters in her life. She gives a brief introduction about the family which would be evaluated further, but she gave me enough coop to interest me. As the love between her father and mother recedes to a darker corner, eventually becoming contempt between the two, she gives me an insight into the childhood she had. She gives a very sarcastic, intriguing prelude about her sister whom she refers as a ‘monster’, in that Yuriko was diabolically beautiful, yet a monster – saying that for people who believe that being beautiful is important over being ugly, she would ask them to have a glimpse at Yuriko. And then she introduces her classmate and friend, Kazue, intelligent, not-so good looking, yet competent personality, who eventually pushes her away and gets much closer to her sister, which kind of gave me a thought if this story was about resentment. Both Yuriko and Kazue, with two completely contrasting personalities come together, end up as prostitutes and are eventually killed and abandoned by the same man, a year apart, and why they were killed and what their lives mean and why the girl bothers sharing the story that is better left unsaid and to the closed wood of the coffin is something that glued me to this book. But the first impressions soon turned into a little horror and true to the name, the story was grotesque, repulsive, incomplete with no apparent reasons to why two seemingly varied personas choose what they chose and why they were murdered. Why did I bother reading it to the end? Because I am a sucker for character study!!!

As the novel progressed, the narrator seems to bring out a rendition of the facts, yet strangely, I seem to be less than sympathetic to her. She is filled with resentment, contempt with everyone and everything that surrounds her and that includes her family, her friends and the relationships in general. She feels that her mother is a born loser, her father, a miserly person and she resents her sister from a very early age because of her angelic and uncharacteristic beauty and the resentment transforms to hatred with her ethereal experience when she watches her sister bathe naked in a pond near their summer cabin. The facts that were so blatantly written causing me much intrigue and promising so much more, turned out to show a twist in the narrator that I deeply detested with every turning page. The novel introduced me to a world that I can hardly believe exists, but the bold faced narration kept me going. Though the loathing for the narrator increased with the twist of the page, I wonder what sort of a rationale prompted her, to even conceive a thought of hating her sister! Yuriko had nothing but a charm in her face that would satisfy men and she revelled in that control over men, particularly elder men and though I do not have much opinion myself about the path chosen, she did what she did openly and showed some integrity rather than play convoluted and twisted mind games with people round her! The narrator could not stand her and she resented that Kazue ended up being a friend to Yuriko. The narrator goes on to speak about the budding love between Kazue and Takashi Kazima, and how she manipulated that love for her own whim, which only made me more aghast at the person she is! On one hand, she speaks of monsters and on the other, she behaves like one, ripping through people’s emotions as though they mean nothing!

In the world of Japan, prostitution is a means to power and the seemingly successful career women, in the hunger for more power, stoop to the immoral and dangerous profession where the words, professor, uncle, brother, friend have little meaning and where life hangs in thin air, delicately balancing lust and desire! But it also threw me into a pit of distress as the true colors and the helplessness of each person come to the surface. Yuriko, held captive by her own beauty and angelic features, is a dimwit with little intelligence who plays to the infidelity of men and uses seduction as a process to counter her own detest of the world, who looks at her as nothing more than a shiny object to play with, her beauty being a curse in itself where she has to fight to survive using the only defence in her, to overcome her insecurity being born as a child to a Japanese mother and Swiss father. Kazue, born to an aspiring father who determines the pecking order in the family based on the grades earned and marks scored, is hell bent on succeeding in life and earning a name for herself, only to realize that to gain power, the very profession (her day job) she chose has limited opportunity and makes a repulsive choice of selling herself to gain the power she very much craved for. As the narrator speaks impassively of these characters, she also introduces numerous other characters who seem to be involved in this bizarre story, yet the most astounding twist comes in the end, where she meets Yuriko’s son, Yurio, who is born blind and has no passion for anything other than music, for which he needs a computer with a specific software. He willingly accepts to stay with his aunt provided she bought him this computer. At forty, the narrator is so captured by the boy’s innocence and wants to live with this little kid. When he pesters her for the computer, she counters that she has little money and he counters, saying,
“why don’t you go and work in the night, like my mom?”.
She slaps him in the face! Then the twist where she walks on the road, shouting that she is forty and a virgin and is available concludes the narration! Now, there is an original reason for getting into what she called immorality! To find a noble cause in the grotesque thing she pursues and willing on to say that people who hate men and women get into this lifestyle…. “its hatred for others, for the rest of the world.”

Though the novel speaks about the reason why the two have been killed, I read the novel not for the suspense of the narration or for the story, but for the characters that seem to be caught in a web cast around them and their reasons for justifying their actions, whether moral or immoral. This is unlike any of the novels I read and will read (I hope), and though this is far from my liking, I should appreciate the boldness of the fiction which would put the contemporary murder fiction and fantasy romance to shame, with its sheer audacity! But, the story that started with a lot of promise ended up with a lot to desire.