Quote: Joe Mama said: Do you blame Kirino herself, or could the translator have done a hatchet-job to the novel? I'm asking because I read Koji Suzuki's Ring trilogy years ago and, while the first novel seemed to suffer from the translator (great book that lagged in places), the other two novels were solid.
I don't know. It has the same cadence that "Out" had, so I don't really think that it comes down to something being lost in translation. Clearly, Kirino is none too fond of how the Japanese view their women - I got that impression with the first book, and you get clubbed on the head with that fact in this one. But in "Out" you cared about what happened to the characters, which is more than I can say for this one.
In "Grotesque" the main narrator loathes her sister, Yuriko, from early childhood because her sister was so beautiful that she considered her beauty monsterous. She is so bitter and cruel to Yuriko, and to her own mother as well, that you can't even feel a modicum of sympathy for her for forever being lost in her sister's stunning shadow. And her cruelty bleeds into her treatment of others, namely a girl named Kazue, who like Yuriko, also ends up as a murdered prostitute. Starting with her mother's suicide, and moving on to the murders of her sister and the girl she taunted growing up, the lead character is so completely indifferent to their deaths that if the she doesn't care about what happened to these people, why should we?
There was just a heartlessness in this book, and a cruelty of the characters that was a complete and utter turnoff for me. As one of the characters believes: "Sex is the only way a woman has to control the world." What a bitter, pathetic and cold way of looking at things. And if that is what Kirino truly believes, then I can think of nothing sadder than that.
Dear, sweet Harley Kwink...I'm madly in love with you. Marry me! We can go to Canadia. Or Boston or something. It'll be grand...You know the cookies are a given. They are ALWAYS a given. You could dump me tomorrow and you'd still get the cookies. Boston..shit, wherever dyke weddings were legalized. And where better to rub their little piggie noses in how bad they suck than right on their doorstep? What are they gonna do? Be jealous of you? Stare furiously at your tah-tahs? Not willingly give you cookies, but instead begrudgingly give you their cookies? Woman, time to wake up to the powers you wield - Uschi
