Real World (Vintage International)
by Natsuo Kirino
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Book Summary Information
Author: Natsuo KirinoEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-07-14
ISBN: 0307387488
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Real World (Vintage International)
Book Review: All too real
Summary: 5 Stars
There are at least two distinct "real" worlds described in "Real World", Natsuo Kirino's most recent novel to be published in the United States. There is the world of parents, teachers, police officers and other adults and there is the world of high school students being driven insane by the pressure exerted on them from the other world. The two worlds are almost but not completely discrete--when they come together it is a disaster for all concerned.
On one level the central action is the murder of a mother by a son--a murder described as seen by the son as the killer and also from the point of view of the mother being murdered, as imagined by her son. An artistic tightrope act like this--effortlessly shifting points of view, startling, almost horrifying images (the description of the metal bat hitting the victim's head and body, for example) done by a lesser novelist might be just the author showing off her verbal chops. For Kirino, though, every action by every character--whether carefully thought out, done at the spur of a moment or even random happenstance--serves her theme of the unbridgeable gap between high school students in Japan, who act as if they are insane but who aren't yet and their parents, who have given in to the insanity. While the murder is brutal, the response of the four girls in the clique at the center of the book is the real story. They are jaw-droppingly casual about the killing itself, even as they become more involved with Worm, the teenage killer, a neighbor of Toshi one of the girls in a clique. Worm steals Toshi's bike and cell phone. He begins calling the numbers in the phone, eventually reaching Terauchi, Kirarin and Yuzan, girls who are not so much friends as allies against the madness around them.
The central reality in all of the girls' lives is the level of the high school they attend--if one is a poor student at an elite school is that better then being a superior student at a merely good school--the college entrance exams they face and dread. Their lives have been based on an 11-month school year with a couple of weeks off between each of the three semesters and the one month summer break taken up by cram school to prepare them for the exams. This has been how they have lived for years, barely seeing their parents, fearful of the future, hating the present with its incessant smog alerts. The novel opens with a metallic voice from a loudspeaker announcing dangerous air quality, which Toshi ignores, a perfect image of how little affect adults have on the teenage world. Under these circumstances killing one's mother makes as much or as little sense as anything else. Toshi is more annoyed with the loss of her cell phone than the death of her neighbor and lies to the police almost naturally and certainly without compunction.
The book is structured as serial narratives from each of the girls. Toshi hears the killing take place next door--hears a struggle and glass breaking--but since she isn't interested in Worm or his mother, thinks little of it once she decides she isn't in danger. Her sections begin and end the book--her style is flat, unadorned and tough, describing both what she sees and what she feels with the same affectless tone. Kirarin is a beauty, one who has been subject to being groped and tormented on the subway by men beginning when she was nine years old. Unaccompanied in trips across the city to a "good" grammar school, wearing her school uniform sailor suit, she was a magnet for the men who molested her and now makes money by accompanying them to love hotels in the afternoon. Yuzan is a Lesbian who decides the real world is the gay subculture she found when she ditched her cram school to cruise gay bars. Both Kirarin and Yuzan are sexual misfits with no connection with their families.
"Real World" begins with murder and ends with suicide, accidental death and random violence. While not quite on the same level as "Out" and "Grotesque" it is a chilling and dismaying look at the world and an extraordinarily well done book.
Summary of Real World (Vintage International)
In a crowded Tokyo suburb, four teenage girls indifferently wade their way through a hot, smoggy summer. When one of them, Toshi, discovers that her nextdoor neighbor has been brutally murdered, the girls suspect the killer is the neighbor's son. But when he flees, taking Toshi's bike and cell phone with him, the four girls get caught up in a tempest of dangers that rise from within them as well as from the world around them. Psychologically intricate and astute, Real World is a searing, eye-opening portrait of teenage life in Japan unlike any we have seen before.Literature & Fiction Books
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