Astunning new work of feminist noir, the genre Natsuo Kirino has defined and made her own in Out and Grotesque.

In a crowded Tokyo suburb, four teenage girls wade indifferently through a hot, smoggy summer. When one of them, Toshi, discovers that her next-door neighbor has been brutally murdered, the girls suspect the neighbor’s son. And when he flees, taking Toshi’s bike and cell phone with him, the four girls get caught up in a tempest of dangers that rise from within as well as from the world around them. Psychologically intricate, Real World is a searing, eye-opening portrait of teenage life in Japan unlike any we have seen before.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Praise for Natsuo Kirino’s Real World 

“Disquieting and suspenseful. . . . As Dostoyevsky did in Crime and Punishment, Kirino pushes her antihero to murder as a means of philosophical statement and communicates an authorial anxiety that contemporary social ills will destroy humanity.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Kirino demands total submission to her characters’ inner lives. . . . Rather than crafting a simple crime novel or painting a grotesque portrait of people ruled by perverse desires and criminal hearts, Kirino’s narrative challenges readers to confront the truth of human nature, to release judgments about violence and see beyond the act to its roots.” –The Miami Herald

“Instead of one lone maniac, Kirino makes adolescent ennui and detachment the villain, tracing out a spooky cultural phenomenon that makes this new translation a purely psychological thriller.” –Time Out Chicago

“It’s difficult to break away from reading Real World. It’s transfixing, and Kirino touches on much deeper issues than unlocking teenage diaries. She captures these youngsters at a turbulent and interstitial period of their lives, and like an updated sociological study, reevaluates a teenager’s place in today’s world. . . . Real World is not exactly a thriller, a mystery or a whodunit. It’s a psychologically complex story told in a breezy, adolescent way, reminiscent of Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan’s groundbreaking French novel written in the similarly disaffected, world-weary voice of a teenager.” –Helen Mitsios, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Brilliant feminist noir. . . . A sleek, assured and disturbing novel about four young women who get caught up in the aftermath of a murder. . . . Reads like Little Women in an acid bath. Alcott would be stunned. . . . Unpredictable and merciless, Real World is hypnotic. . . . You won’t want to miss it.” –The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Jealousy, solipsism, fear, arrogance–the mind of an adolescent can be a frustrating and scary place. . . . [Real World] takes us deep inside the heads of these kids.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“If Real World is indeed a work of social realism, Kirino is either a masterful cynic or the cartographer of a very scary side of reality.” –The New York Sun

“It’s rare to come across a book that is unlike anything you’ve ever read. Real World is such a book. . . . Kirino’s mix of the savage and the mundane is masterful. . . . Hers is a fresh, contemporary voice that captures the attitude of youth culture around the world. . . . An addictive, compelling read.” –Daily Camera (Boulder)

“Disturbingly intimate. . . . [Kirino’s characters] speak as one voice of youth in an utterly hypnotic, illuminating narrative.” –Paste

“A novel that looks at the emotional vacuum of teenage culture, one less affected by a brutal murder and its emotional aftershocks than by the glow of its association with a manufactured outlaw. . . . Kirino delves deeply into the feelings of isolation and hopelessness that each girl shares. . . . She works to understand how the girls can become so disassociated from their own moral center, ultimately insinuating that after being raised in a culture of texting, reality shows, etc., they’re looking for any connection to the feeling world.” –Providence Journal

“Impressive. . . . [Real World’s] sinister plot provides Kirino with plenty of welcome occasions to render the acute psychosexual portraiture at which she so excels. . . . Kirino’s high-toned crime-fiction is, above all, morbidly fascinating.” –The Tennessean

“[A] taut thriller. . . . [Kirino] has a knack for portraying the lives of teenage girls.” –More

“Kirino creates a fictional universe in which the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. Through Worm, she chronicles the toxic fall-out of an educational system that fosters conformity above individualism. . . . And Philip Gabriel’s excellent translation helps to bring this lurid tale into even sharper focus.” –The Independent (UK)

“Kirino has written a kind of anti-coming-of-age-novel. . . . Noir and coming-of-age are traditionally polar opposites, but Kirino brings them together brilliantly, showing that learning about yourself is not always a meaningful experience. Readers of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark will feel right at home here.” –Booklist (starred)

“Bleak, exquisitely imagined. . . . Real World is not a whodunit but a disturbing whydunit. . . . A novel of murder most creepy.” –The Georgia Straight (Vancouver)

“Real World is unusual: a thriller with a strong moral overtone, it begins with violence and ends with regret. . . . It’s [Kirino’s] portrayal of typically teenaged double-triple lives that makes this story so successful and so disturbing. It's not the murder, but the reaction to it that will strike fear into the hearts of readers. . . . As strange as this is to say about a novel dealing with matricide, Real World might be a good book for parents and adolescents to read together. It covers a lot of big issues in a way that is truly captivating. This is Christopher Pike with a conscience. . . . Real World has wide appeal. It will engage people everywhere–men and women, young and old–because Kirino is an extremely talented writer with a style that is unmistakably her own, even in translation.” –The Gazette (Montreal)

“Kirino unflinchingly describes the contemporary social conditions of teenagers from their point of view . . . [and] honestly depicts the blatant as well as subtle acts of violence done by and to teenagers in modern Japan. . . . Highly recommended.” –Library Journal

From the Hardcover edition.

Natsuo Kirino, born in 1951, quickly established a reputation in her country as one of a rare breed of mystery writers whose work goes well beyond the conventional crime novel. This fact has been demonstrated by her winning not only the Grand Prix for Crime Fiction in Japan for Out in 1998, but one of its major literary awards--the Naoki Prize--for Soft Cheeks (which has not yet been published in English), in 1999. Several of her books have also been turned into feature movies. Out was the first of her novels to appear in English and was nominated for an Edgar Award. Kirino is also the author of Grotesque.

From the Trade Paperback edition.