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In North America, it's Columbine. In Japan, it's Sakakibara Seito, the fourteen-year-old boy who, a decade or so ago in Kobe, beheaded a retarded eleven-year-old child and confessed to killing a ten-year-old girl. Novelists Wally Lamb and Lionel Shriver, among many others, have responded to the former atrocity, Natsuo Kirino the latter in REAL WORLD. Parents everywhere, looking at their offspring with a new wariness, may find a certain degree of insight reading the American novels, but Kirino offers cold comfort indeed and very little in the way of explanation. It may be the summer school holiday and very hot as the book opens but four girls are about to set off for "cram school," extra lessons designed to enhance their chances of acceptance at a good university. One of them, Toshiko, who prefers to call herself Ninna Hori, hears a puzzling crash from the house next door. One her way out the door, she is relieved to see her next-door neighbour, a boy nicknamed Worm, emerge - not a burglar, then. In fact much worse - Worm has just battered his mother to death. He seems quite cheerful as he greets Toshiko for the first time that she can remember. Worm goes on to steal her bicycle on which he makes his escape and with it her cell phone which has fallen into her bike basket. He proceeds to call the three girls in her phone book, Ninna Hori's best friends, who one by one become implicated in aiding his flight. The book takes the form of first person inner monologues by the girls and by Worm himself which simultaneously recount the story and reflect on it. What is immediately striking about all the monologues is the absolute lack of compassion expressed for the mother whose brains are splattered all over the wall of her home. She was not known to the girls nor was she gossipped about in the neighbourhood. She seems to have been an ordinary middle-class Japanese woman who wanted the best for her son and went to considerable lengths to see that he succeeded in the elite private high school he attends and where he is doing badly. In Worm's view, that was her sin - expecting from him more than he was able or willing to produce and for that she had to die. In this, she apparently is indistinguishable from all the other mothers in this suburb. As each girl speaks about herself and her involvement in Worm's flight, she reveals what it is about her that makes her individual. What they pride themselves on is sadly tiny variants from the norm - one is the "serious" one, one the party girl and only non-virgin, one simply has a secret name, and one is consumed with anger at her own mother, not because she is too present in her life, but too absent. She is dead. But save for these differences, there is a sameness about each girl's reflections that makes it difficult to keep them separate. Perhaps in the original Japanese, there is something in the language they adopt that would help identify them, but in translation, such subtleties are lost. It will come as no surprise to the reader that any tale that begins this badly will end even worse. What was a surprise to me was how little I cared. The deadness of the girls' narration, their inability to think beyond themselves, while hardly unusual in adolescents, distanced me from them so that I could observe their fate, while tragic, with equanimity. I must also confess to a nagging suspicion about the tactic Kirino adopts to tell her story. She is a middle-aged woman, older probably than these girls' mothers would be. How well, one wonders, does she comprehend what is going on in the minds of seventeen-year-olds? How far can we trust her analysis of the anomie with which she endows them? Or are they primarily a function of the existential bleakness that characterizes Kirino's work in general? Though I raised questions about what might be lost in translation, on the whole Gabriel's rendering of the text was eminently readable, especially as he is able to convey at least a hint of what might be going on in the language of the original. All this said, REAL LIFE is a difficult book to read, but, once begun, harder to put down.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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