I found this book incredibly disturbing and can't say I enjoyed it. Despite this I do think it is well written and ties the characters together well and was an insightful look into the Japanese culture, the level of competition that exists between students, families and colleagues is certainly not healthy but appears to be the norm and was fascinating to read about. ( )

Fantastic and very disturbing feminist noir about the pressures on four women who were once classmates at a prestigious Japanese high school: the unnamed narrator of most of the book, half-Japanese and half-white, who hates and is profoundly jealous of her monstrously beautiful sister, Yuriko; Yuriko, whose beauty attracts more attention than she can handle, leading her to modeling and prostitution both glamorous and seedy; Mitsuru, perfectly balanced and somehow lacking; and Kazue, smart but not as smart as the rest of her classmates, determined to fit in, half-aware and entirely in denial that determination will not make up for beauty or money. Yuriko and Kazue become street-corner prostitutes murdered by an illegal Chinese immigrant; Mitsuru becomes the member of a religious cult and is imprisoned for her involvement in a mass murder. Those aren't spoilers, they're all in the opening chapters. As the book unfolds, we learn more about Q High School and the terrible effects of rigidity, competition, and sexism, all filtered through several extremely unreliable narrators. I love and distrust the main, nameless narrator and her unwavering malevolence and spite. Many of the reviews focus on the book as an expose of the Japanese class system, which is accurate, but I found a lot of it painfully apt and familiar as a woman in another media-saturated society and also, oddly, as someone who went to a elite magnet high school with entrance by competitive exam. ( )

I enjoyed this book, though it seemed to be much longer than it actually was for some reason. I have just started my final internship for college and have a lot going on right now, so that was probably part of the problem at least. I thought the characters were well-developed, though none of them were very likable. I agree with the statement on the back cover that this book is more of a character study than a mystery. ( )

I'd wanted to read this book for a while, and when I finally did, I was very impressed. I really liked this book. It was disturbing, outrageous at times, and thought-provoking. Kirino examines with a clinical eye the classist, sexist underbelly of polite Japanese society and does it very well, and very critically.

This is a very good book; I found the way it was structured, the shifts in perspective, and the minute changes in prose-style from character to character to be very well done. It could have been extraordinary, and fully deserving of 4 stars (or higher) except for two things.

First, I found the translation to be lacking. I am not multilingual and it's times like this that I really wish I was. I realize that with any translation to or from another culture, there will be nuances and verbal stylistics that cannot possibly be fully captured. However, in the case of Grotesque I really did feel there was a disconnect between the author and the translation. I don't really have any concrete or satisfactory way of explaining this; I have read some excellent translations, and this just didn't feel like one to me.

The second issue I have with the book is the ending and the censorship of the American publisher. When reading the book, I noticed that the ending was cut up to the point where it made the climax pointless. I was actually so frustrated with the ending that I went online to see if, perhaps, my copy was missing pages or something. What I found instead was that the ending of the novel had been abridged by the English publishers because they found it discomforting and "too taboo" for their western audience. This was because it depicted underage male prostitution; ironic considering that the majority of the book is, quite graphically at times, concerned with underage female prostitution which did not get altered. ( )

This is the second book I've read by the author and I absolutely loved it. Everything in this book is grotesque, from the classist society and relationships between the characters to each individual who is depicted as grotesque in their own way. Beauty is 'monsterous', as is the desire to work hard and get ahead. The book is obsessed by looks and there are many detailed descriptions here of people's faces, their clothes and the way they present themselves. Everyone's fate in the book seems to be just accepted by the characters in a totally determinist way. No matter how hard they try, ultimately they accept their fate as criminal, prostitute, pimp or murderer in a way that almost negates any free will they might once have had.

There is no doubt that the book is harrowing in places, particularly the description of Kazue Sako's descent into madness, but the insight into Japanese culture and society is so incredibly interesting that it's easy to become very quickly immersed in the story. Once again, Kirino has written beautifully and I've already added her third translated book to my wanted list. She really is a truly talented writer who can keep the reader absolutely gripped. I was so disappointed when the book ended that I wanted to immediately read it over again. ( )