Everything about this book is what the title suggests. I can't even begin where the most grotesque part is. It really started out slow and I was left thinking if the book was worth it but as I read along, it was worth it but not something I'll read again. The theme was heavy, it's not a crime novel but a narration of 4 parts. Different stories, some overlapping depending on whose point of view it is. It keeps coming back to the original narrator, whose name was never mentioned in the book. She's just a label like 'someone's older sister'.Although I didn't like the characters, I liked how the whole book was written, it was very free flow like you're eavesdropping on someone's diary because most of this book's content are journal excerpts. I liked and at the same time didn't like the effect of this book because the writer conveyed the anger so well I felt the anger and the hatred in real life, but the thing I didn't like is myself being cranky for no reason. Because of this book, I was intrigued with her other novel "Out". ( )

Two prostitutes are murdered in Tokyo – one is the once “monstrously beautiful” younger sister of the unnamed narrator of this tale, another once attended the same elite high school. The narrator gives us her own take on their lives and deaths, and the trial of their alleged killer, supplemented by various other accounts.

For me, one of the book’s strengths was the distinct voices of the characters who tell the story – they are each complicated human beings with their own individual prejudices, agendas, and blind spots. I suppose I liked the way in which, because of this, my perspective of characters and events shifted as I progressed through the book, and voices once sympathised with to an extent, became monstrous.

Some quite poignant scenes highlight some of the difficulties of life in a strictly hierarchical society, and the loneliness and isolation that can be experienced by those who just don’t fit in as they should. For me, the most interesting questions raised by the novel centred around the education system depicted therein. Are we right to tell students that they can achieve whatever they want if they just dream big enough and try hard enough? Or are we selling them a lie? Is the principal of the school right to regret that he didn’t do enough to prepare his students for the real world?

I enjoyed the book for the questions that it raised, but ultimately found it hard engaging with these characters, and lost interest to an extent as the story unfolded. ( )

This is not the voice of a major novelist. She has gotten some great reviews, both here on Amazon and in print, but the reviewers are mainly discussing her work as a reflection of contemporary Japan: in other words, they are reading it as documentary evidence of social phenomena. As a novel, "Grotesque" is fairly poor. Two points about that.

1. In three sections of the book, we read texts written by characters other than the protagonist of the novel (who writes, or narrates, the novel itsef). The first and third are diaries, and the second is a court deposition. But the styles of all three are almost completely uniform with the style of the protagonist. I can imagine that it might be said that this is a translation, but I am basing this on traits that survive translation. It's very improbable that the two diarists and the accused man writing in custody will have exactly the same chatty style, the same apostrophes to the reader, and even the same manner with spoken dialogue. Even phrases are repeated. And it seems especially improbable that a police deposition will flower into a long, fairly skillful, first-person narrative with speaking characters, whose pace, style, and mannerisms is such a close match for the novelist's pace, style, and mannerisms.

2. The book's main purpose is to explore the characters of the narrator and her friends and relatives. All are twisted -- made grotesque -- by Japanese society. The narrator herself is grotesque, and so the novel turns on the old, and potentially interesting, trope of the unreliable narrator. How twisted is she? Can we rely on what she says? I would like to say that Kirino is actually not very introspective, that she is not the best person to write about these characters. That sounds improbable, I know: anyone who accuses a novelist of being less than introspective will sound suspicious. But consider two things:

(a) Several characters in the book are prostitutes, and the book is centrally concerned about why they turned to prostitution, and how the pressures of Japanese society affected that choice. But a reader waits, through hundreds of pages, for some rumination, on the part of any of the characters, about what prostitution does for them. Halfway through the book, there is on brief passage in which one of the diarists considers the issue. It is inconclusive, and isn't followed up. And then, a page from the end of the novel, the narrator reminds us of it, and actually quotes it! As if we could have forgotten! The lines introducing the passage are: "In her diaries, Yuriko made some interesting comments about prostitution. If you'll indulge me, I will quote them here." There isn't even an acknowledgment that the imaginary reader might have forgotten the lines; the assumption seems to be that they will have forgotten. But how could any attentive reader forget the only lines in the novel that purport to explain the central problem of the novel?

(b) The characters, especially the narrator, tend to identify themselves according to simple types and ideas. The narrator describes her special genius as maliciousness. I did not count the number of times she says that -- it's on the order of fifty or sixty. Now there's nothing wrong with that device: it indicates the narrator has an idee fixe about herself. She makes no progress in understanding herself. But to use that kind of device, it is necessary not to make it seem as if the reader doesn't know it, or might have forgotten it. Here is an example: aside from maliciousness, the narrator also presents herself as a person who is fascinated by people's faces, and the way that traits can be passed on from one generation to the next. We learn that in the first two pages of the book, and whenever she meets someone new she studies their face for signs of their character. So do we really need to be told, on page 298 (!), that "I was fascinated by the way genes are passed along, the way they are damaged and mutated"? I want to be clear about my claim here: it can work very well to have a character repeat something about herself -- it can indicate stasis, or unawareness, or even dementia -- but here it sounds as if the novelist has an idea about the character -- this is how the character behaves -- and just brings it out each time, hoping the repetition will create a sustaining or evolving or deepening sense of the character. It ends up sounding like the author does not have the imagination to either show us verbatim repetitions as a sign of the "grotesque," or else modulate the appearances of the character's idee fixe so that it can tell us something new about the character with each appearance.

It is difficult, and time consuming, to try to express these characteristics. But they are, I think, very important. They are among the differences between an ordinary novelist and someone who really controls the medium. ( )

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. ( )