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Tim O'Brien

313. Natsuo Kirino - Grotesque


Misleadingly packaged as a thriller (which it isn’t) this is the strangest book I've read on holiday.

A very weird Japanese novel about beauty, ugliness, jealousy, the Japanese class system, bit of incest and prostitution (there’s a blend for you).

Two Japanese prostitutes are murdered I think it transpires by the same Chinese immigrant, who is obsessed by incestuous longings for his dead sister, and substitutes them for her.

The prostitutes mirror each other’s lives – one an impossible beauty (when young) with a madly jealous sister who is the main and not at all reliable narrator; the other a misunderstood and bullied when younger office worker who doubles as a prostitute by night. The two fading beauties blend and are I think bother murdered by the Chinaman.

Strange and different.


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