Eastern Novel is like "Little Women" in Acid Bath.

Darryl Livingston

26 July 2008

In Japan, "Real World" is the title of a sleek, guaranteed and annoying novel about 4 youthful girls who get caught up in the result of a murder. Kirino, who crossed over from writing love stories to investigator fiction, is well known for her novel "Out" which claimed Japan's top puzzle award in 1998 and was a finalist here for an Edgar prize. "Out" was a sensation in Japan, arguable in its outline of a quartet of employees in a dull boxed lunch factory whose lives are inverted when one of them kills her partner in a rage. The assumption that jap ladies -- who cultivate demure or giggly personas in public -- are capable of menace and crime packs a story belt. Kirino carries this tension over into "Real World." This time, the psychologically complicated femmes are Tokyo high school seniors, beset with self-doubt, squashing schoolwork and perverts on the train. She's taking a cell call from her smart, hard-to-read mate Terauchi:. "In our four-girl group, all of us have a 2nd fake name that we used when we hire a karaoke box. You must use caution, Terauchi always warned us, or you may wind up in some database.

Adults are shockingly distant in these girls ' lives. The girls share some of the same craving and worry as the 4 remarkable March girls made by Louisa May Alcott. Yet "Real World" reads like "Little Women" in an acid bath. The tale flows from Toshiko's impulsive call not to inform police about the crash and breaking glass she heard next doorway. At once afterward, she saw the neighbor boy appear, humming a song, fresh -- it seems later -- from matricide. In this fashion, the 4 buddies are drawn into degrees of complicity with his crime. Western reviewers have compared Kirino to James M Cain and Foyodor Dostoyevsky, and in a hint of authorial cleverness, the killer asks Terauchi to scribble up an account of his act : "Sprinkle in some Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche or whatever" he asserts. The quartet -- brainy Terauchi, kind but complex Toshiko, semi-closeted Yuzan and brazen party girl Kirarin -- are all recognizable, plausible and unpleasant. Lots of the novel glides along on cell-phone dialogue. The boy, it seems, actually likes Stephen King. "Novels are closer to real life than manga" he asserts, "it's like they show you the genuine world with one layer peeled away, a fact you will not see otherwise.".