Coming of Age in Tokyo: Natsuo Kirino’s ‘Real World’
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Guilty societies fear their children. Though Natsuo Kirino’s “Real World” (Alfred A. Knopf, 208 pages, $23.95) concerns only one instance of matricide, the sympathy with which other teenagers take up the cause of the disaffected killer seems to condemn the whole society. When one girl says that parents are like “people who live in some far-off other country,” she speaks for all Ms. Kirino’s characters: They take commonplaces of teen disillusionment as fact, and live in a world without history or morals. The ladders of a cutthroat meritocracy are the only standards adults have shown them.
Worm, so-called because of his small head and nerdy physique, attends one of Tokyo’s elite high schools, as his mother likes to mention to everyone she meets. But though smart, Worm is one of the school’s least-gifted students, and his mother’s constant bragging infuriates him. When he is caught spying on a neighbor’s young wife, his mother humiliates him and uses the episode as an excuse to move to a new, classier neighborhood. For these reasons he murders her with an aluminum baseball bat.
Ms. Kirino lets Worm state his motives flatly. Though he experiences delusions of grandeur later in the book — he believes he is at war, and starts issuing military commands to everyone around him — Ms. Kirino does not center her book on his craziness.
Instead, she follows four girls, an everyday clique of fairly serious students, who fall in with Worm when he finds their numbers on a stolen cell phone and starts calling them. They are attracted by the glamour of murder and are, in some cases, explicitly sympathetic. Each of the girls takes her turn in the narration, presenting her own everyday problems alongside Worm’s. Yuzan, a closeted lesbian, tells Worm that, like him, she murdered her own mother. In fact, she is expressing guilt that she neglected her mother — who died of cancer — by refusing to see her on her deathbed.
Ponderous and self-pitying, Yuzan explicates the book’s theme, that of the muddled relationship between teenagers and what they call “the real world.” Unwilling to face college entrance exams while she wrestles with her sexuality, she declares that she will skip college. Her father, a widower, lectures her about the “real world,” but Yuzan is too proud of her secret sexual experimentation to give her father’s perspective any credence. “I’m already out in what you call the world. A world of emotions that’s different from what my old man’s talking about. I wanted to tell him this, but that would mean revealing I was gay.”
And yet a heavy-handed prudence characterizes the behavior of all of the girls, as Ms. Kirino brings them close to the brink of loving Worm, only to draw each girl back in time for the next to take over.
Kirarin, a flirt who belongs to several cliques and who regards herself as more experienced than the other girls in the novel, joins Worm on a days-long getaway, hiding with him in a love hotel and then an abandoned cottage. Like all Ms. Kirino’s characters, she spews teenage wisdom even while contemplating murder: “When he’s doing karaoke and insists on selecting only the songs he likes — another moron. Guys who go out to pick up girls are morons, too ’cause they’re so self-centered. So why do I like to be picked up, then? I can’t figure it out.”
Ms. Kirino’s faithfulness to teenage navel-gazing slows down a book that should have been suspenseful, like her first two, “Out” and “Grotesque.” Toshi, a tough-minded girl who lives next door to Worm, and whose narration begins the book, manages to deliver a fast, selfless prose. She is on her way to cram school when the book begins, and her interest in Worm’s crime next door is circumstantial.
Terauchi, the girl who ultimately turns Worm in to the police, is similarly compelling: She easily tires of Worm’s psychodrama, and is able to keep in mind that his actions are fundamentally wrong. Yet her betrayal sets the stage for a police situation in which Kirarin dies, and Terauchi then kills herself. In her suicide note, she restates the book’s theme in the most melodramatic teenage frame: “Bye-bye. I’m off on a journey to the real world. ‘Cause within this meta-reality what’s real is this — my death.”
Each of the girls feels sorry for herself in one way or another, and it’s difficult to judge the state of teenage society in Japan from the novel when not one of the characters seems to have gained much perspective on life.
Life is cheap, to Ms. Kirino’s characters, because it has so far consisted of the educational system, which according to everyone involved is emphatically not “real,” and yet nothing beyond that system, except for sex, seems to interest them. And sex, too, has been a source of frustration. Worm, who takes this frustration to its extreme, blames his mother, calling her guilty:
Guilty of leading me around by the nose, messing up my life, revealing my secrets to the world. I was a colony and she was the occupying force. She created the rubber plantation, made me work from dawn to night, then took away the whole harvest for herself. … I don’t know what exactly was stolen from me. But most definitely the old lady continued to steal something.
Though sordid, he claims to be an innocent. Because they don’t understand the real world, the characters in this book give it no respect. If they behave like savages, it is because they are bewildered and overmatched. Ms. Kirino does not apologize for their behavior, she simply lets it sit on the page. Perhaps her novel is meant as an allegory, but it does not read as such, at least in translation. If “Real World” is indeed a work of social realism, Ms. Kirino is either a masterful cynic or the cartographer of a very scary side of reality.
blytal@nysun.com