"Grotesque"

Natsuo Kirino, author of "Grotesque" and "Out"

In her riveting new novel Grotesque, Kirino once again depicts a barely known Japan. This is the story of three Japanese women and the interconnectedness of beauty and cruelty, sex and violence, ugliness and ambition in their lives. Tokyo prostitutes Yuriko and Kazue have been brutally murdered, their deaths leaving a wake of unanswered questions about who they were, who their murderer is, and how their lives came to this end. As their stories unfurl in an ingeniously layered narrative, coolly mediated by Yuriko’s older sister, we are taken back to their time in a prestigious girls’ high school—where a strict social hierarchy decided their fates—and follow them through the years as they struggle against rigid societal conventions. Shedding light on the most hidden precincts of Japanese society today, Grotesque is both a psychological investigation into the female psyche and a classic work of noir fiction. It is a stunning novel, a book that confirms Natsuo Kirino’s electrifying gifts.

Natsuo Kirino was born in 1951. The author of sixteen novels, four collections of short stories and one essay collection, she won the Japan Mystery Writers’ Association Prize for Out in 1998, as well as the Naoki Prize, one of Japan's premier literary awards, for Soft Cheeks (which has not yet been published in English) in 1999. Several of her books have also been turned into movies and her work has been translated into more than 19 different languages. Out was the first of her novels to appear in English and was nominated for an Edgar Award. Grotesque, Kirino’s next book to be translated into English, won the Izumi Kyoka Literary Award in Japan and was published by Alfred A. Knopf in March 2007.

Program followed by reception and book-signing.

Other programs in the IEAS Book Series: New Perspectives on East Asia.