Beauty as the monster devouring family's lives
Ultimately, all the characters confess their crimes to the narrator, the bitter observer burdened by her sister's looks.
By Natsuo Kirino
Translated by Rebecca Copeland
Knopf. 467 pp. $24.95
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Reviewed by David Thayer
Physiognomy is obsession in Natsuo Kirino's novel
Grotesque
. The planes and shadows of the human face become maps of a future foretold. Add a strong dose of fatalism to the mix, and the story of how two young women from a prestigious school become victims of murder takes the reader through the history of a family doomed by a toxic mix of beauty and resentment.
The unnamed narrator is the older of two children born to a Swiss father and a Japanese mother. Burdened by her sister's beauty and her utter disgust for her parents, she is convinced that beauty is a monster devouring the lives of everyone around her. The book's opening chapters are a clinical examination of the narrator's burgeoning malice. Christmas at a Japanese mountain cabin provides the spark for a dramatic break between her and her sister; a dirty trick on the younger girl results in Yuriko's going to live with another family, the Johnsons, a family demonstrably more glamorous than her own.
The murder of two Tokyo prostitutes takes place within the narrator's adult perspective, bringing the story briefly into a present as precarious as the journal-style flashbacks that dominate the opening chapters. One of the dead women is Yuriko, the sister lost so many years earlier, doomed by her flawless skin, radiant hair and perfect form. Yuriko's death triggers remembrance, not grief, and the novel shifts to the school years where the sisters' lives overlap again.
Yuriko returns to Japan after her mother commits suicide in Switzerland. She is accepted into the Q system, a school for elite students. But her only qualification is her looks. She's had an affair with her Swiss uncle and begins sleeping with her benefactor Johnson. Yuriko is recruited for the Cheerleaders Club, the Q system's highest honor. Her biology professor is compromised by his role in admitting Yuriko, while his son takes on the job of acting as her pimp. These outrages are duly noted as evidence of the corruption Yuriko's beauty spawns. Other students are drawn into the web, one a girl named Kazue, a weak-willed fellow traveler destined to be the center of the Office Lady Murder and, like Yuriko, a prostitute murdered in close proximity to her idol.
Yuriko gets her turn on the page, an opportunity to present her side of things, which she does, in businesslike fashion. She is a seductress, a nymphomaniac who craves sex as the sole expression of her existence. As soon as the act is complete, Yuriko sees her lover's attentions dwindle, his satisfaction the seed of her emptiness. The only way to feel alive is to seek that crescendo of desire, to pull life to her from outside.
A lengthy confession follows the indictment of Zhang, a man whose epic journey from rural China to modern Japan culminates in a chance encounter with Yuriko in a Tokyo park. Zhang is a lost soul, a pitiful foreigner who sees Yuriko as his dead sister, a casualty of their illegal passage, washed overboard by a rogue wave with Japan visible on the horizon. The reader may pity Zhang before realizing that his version of events is a fantasy.
Ultimately, all the characters confess their crimes to the narrator, described derisively as unworthy of her own name, her plain looks a disaster magnified by her sister's outlandish beauty, a girl born with a vivid belief that genetics have sealed her fate as a bitter observer and, for good measure, a survivor, cursed to live her life outraged by her bad luck.
Grotesque succeeds as a layered exploration of the human psyche, of the conflict inherent in need and desire, shame and humiliation. Character after character dissolves, until finally the haughty narrator herself becomes the very thing she hates the most, a desperate woman seeking love.
The truth is spoken on the novel's last page where, for an instant, the narrator acknowledges human need and sets out to seek fulfillment. The brilliance of the novel lies deep in the crevasse of her obsession. In pursuing a beautiful nephew, she becomes vulnerable and, like the rest of us, will experience pain and disappointment. Allure and attraction leave what Françoise Sagan called scars on the soul. Grostesque is a powerful study of people humbled at the altar of superficial values.