Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino trs Rebecca Copeland

Recently, Japanese crime fiction has been following the same disturbing lines as its cinema, dissecting urban lives in clinical detail, and creating imagery that conjures sensations of alienation and melancholia.

Natsuo Kirino broke new ground with Out, a dissection of the friendship between four factory women that charted the loss of solidarity and breakdown of trust following a concealed murder. Now she has taken this painstakingly scientific approach a step further with Grotesque. Two prostitutes have been murdered in Tokyo. One, Yuriko, learned to manipulate her effect on men from an early age, selling her body while still at school. Although lacking in intellect, she is disturbingly beautiful. The other, the unpopular and lonely Kazue, has intelligence and career prospects, but her damaged psyche is born of a sense of isolation. The pair were educated at the same prestigious school, and held future promise in different ways.

Linking the pair is an embittered, plain girl who was sister to Yuriko and friend to Kazue, and it is through her narrative, as well as the girls' diaries, that we slowly come to understand the painful desperation to succeed that drives one, and the desire for acceptance that haunts the other.

The murders are virtually identical, so, when a Chinese immigrant is arrested for the first, it follows that he also carried out the second. However, he refuses to admit to the slaying of Kazue, so how did the other girl die? As the history of the girls unfolds, suspicions creep in that the crime is not as straightforward as it might first appear.

"For a girl," says the narrator, "appearance can be a powerful form of oppression", in terms of beauty and unattractivness, body and spirit. Although her language is as spare and unsparing as that of her contemporaries, Kirino is separated from them by a determination to depict the psyches of her female protagonists in overwhelming detail. Her women are studied from every angle; via their relationships with family, each other, the men around them, the food they prepare and their daily working lives. This gradual, merciless exposure has the dual effect of creating emotional involvement with the characters while placing them in the greater context of Japanese society, so that the narrative becomes something other than the mere dismantling of motives behind a crime.

Perhaps because we're used to seeing Tokyo through the antics of salarymen in neon nightclubs, the strict hierarchy that places hidden pressures on females comes as a shock here, but it is also identifiable in our own culture. Kirino provides us with a fresh way of viewing the subtleties of Japanese society through its formerly silent and invisible women, especially as Yuriko and her sister are of mixed race, a fact which disorients them further in the complicated business of growing up under the eyes of peers and parents. This is only Kirino's second translated novel, but it already seems obvious that she may be the best crime writer to emerge from Japan in years.

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