Real World

Hello Gentle Reader

This is the Japan I had since searched for. Yukio Mishima writes about a more traditional Japan, just opening up to the concept of western influence, and the nihilistic wanderings of Japan after World War II. The Nobel Laureate in Literature of nineteen-sixty eight, Yasunari Kawabata discussed the traditional beauty of Japan in a modern world. Kenzaburo Oe the Nobel Laureate in Literature of nineteen-ninety four, is more American and European (specifically French) literary influenced, and deals more closely with the intimate and personal relationship he has with his brain damaged son Hikari. Haruki Murakami’s Japan is rather Americanized, dripping in pop culture, and music, with surreal and magical moments, that are accepted. Yet with Natsuo Kirinio’s noir novel “Real World,” This is the Japan I had since imagined and become suspicious of. This the contemporary Japan. This is the Japan that everyone speaks about. The Japan of tiny houses; capsule hotels; young girls as sexual objects; the polluted air; the students stressed out by school that they have mental breakdowns and even commit suicide. In a sense it’s a world of plasticity, a place overcome with postmodernism, consumerism, mass media – it’s an empire of information overload, over come with a sense of general apathy, and a falsity where people are not what they seem. They are all there hidden in their own worlds. Universes and galaxies a part. The people are separated physically by their flesh. They are separated by the spaces between them. Their places at the dinner table. Their seats on the subway, or the clothing that touches each other, as they walk down the street. However mentally they are all so distant off and gone, surrounded in their own inner world, far away from the stresses of their reality. Students dare not to think of cram schools, and college entrance exams, or their teachers and their stifling and stuffy lessons. Parents escape into a different world; they disregard their children as simple worry. Fathers disappear. They hide in the bars, drinking. They watch the fantasy’s of prostitutes, strippers, geisha, and fantasize about it, while disregarding the fact that they are married and have children, only then slip on home to sleep in their bed with their wives, and hide in their drunken dream, only to wake up the next day and repeat the same cycle over and over again. Wives and mothers, do their own work, lost in their own worlds. Day time television I am sure, watching tabloid news, soap operas. The children themselves hide from themselves, lost in their own lifestyles. They hide their identity with false names, which they give to fortune tellers, and on other odd ends that come with the consumerist society of Japan. Theirs the fake smiles, of the older students, going around to the cram schools. They are always smiling, giving pep talks on college education, and telling students, to work on getting their grade point average up. Study like their lives depends on it. Study twelve hours and take their average up three percent. Study until you cough up blood. All of this and pressure to succeed. Go to good colleges, and good universities, and the real sense that if one does not they would be a failure. A failure in the Japanese society. This is the life that all these characters have to live. The constant sirens of air pollution. The constant threat of dishonour of not making it into any university. Soon they would be one of the prostitutes or strippers, which dance shamelessly for the men. But there is more danger looking out into the world then the dishonour of education. There are shady men who hide in the world, and watch little girls. Who even prey on them. It is a world of repressed sexuality and explicit sexual marketing. A place of neon lights, which are shinning and blinking everywhere. It’s a postmodern Disneyland, and a dangerous place. A carnival where everyone see’s the sites, and yet does not find them awe inspiring or amazing but simply, just the reality and normal scenery that they pass by every day.

Natsuo Kirino does not lament this newly discovered Japan – or rather what Japan has become. She expresses it with what it is and what it has become. She describes this new Japan as a consumerist driven society, and how people are not as what they appear to be. No one ever appears to be what they are. Kirarin is a fine example. How she lies about herself on those chat rooms, and then goes and picks and meets up with the men; or rather goes and see’s how she not only deceived them but how she herself was deceived. How she also deceives her friends. How they think they are this kind and sweet hearted woman. She herself is just like the rest of Japan. Disconnected and dissociated form everything and everyone around her. Lost in chat rooms, of playing deceiving games with each other men, who are also pretending be something they are not. Then there is Yuzan she hides her sexuality away from her friends. She shuns it from them. She goes out and meets other lesbians like Dahmer, and connects with them. She appears to despise her own gender, wishing to be a man. Maybe life would be easier for her if she was a man, not just a lesbian woman. Then she could be accepted for her sexuality because it would have been perceived as normal. Then there is ‘Worm,’ who in act of being God commits matricide. He is a complete nobody. His parents pressured and pushed him to do well in his elite school, though there he is shunned as a nobody, just as he is shunned as a nobody or just a distant shadow in a storm of other shadows. In an act of extreme violence Worm is noticed by everyone. Yet in this action all the same Worm remains abstract. His mother is dead – he himself had murdered her; this new reality just seems odd to him. A reality he cannot comprehend. So he flees, and disappears into the surrounding prefectures of Tokyo; however at the same time, he is the odd man out. His act or rebellion has only further to alienate him from everyone else. Terauchi is the smartest of the bunch. However her intelligence and great student appearance has left her arrogant and lonely from the others. She believes herself to be more clever than that of the rest of her friends. She only finds some solace on some subjects if only briefly with her friend Toshi whose casual and apathetic demeanour does not hide her sensitive true self.

This is the world that these characters inhabit. A world of distrust and disillusionment. These four girls have a great distrust of the adult world, that they are being so carefully groomed for. Worm was the same way. But he openly shatters the barrier separating him from the real world, and from the world he is living. By committing matricide, Worm is able to destroy that barrier, which separated him from the world he was being carefully educated for. Is this why he then seeks the approval and the sympathy of the other characters? Those four girls, who distrust the adult world, who fear it, who lurk away to find their own sense of reality other than the one that they themselves are going enter regardless of how they feel.

The entire concept of reality is key to Natuso Kirino’s work. For the characters in this book, the only reality they know or have had is the reality of the educational system, which is dog eat dog. A gladiator pit. No one can be trusted. It is all about beating the other students. Looking out for oneself. Getting into a better college, and succeeding in life. This is all the characters have. This is what they live for. This is it. This is all. There is nothing else really that they live for. They live their own lives – though those lives are also kept secret from everyone else. In their own world. Their own realities. They all separated from each other. Even the friends of Toshi, Terauchi, Yuzan, and Kirarin, are all separate in their lives. Delving into the depths of the reality, and the real world. Even that has its own costs. Dodging perverts, making sure they are not attacked or raped by someone.

There are a few problems with Natsuo Kirino’s fiction. She tells rather than shows. Her characters are not all that deep, there are very few complexities. They fall prey to their own cliques which lead to a lot of clichés.

In the end it is just a simple noir novel. A novel about the modern Japan. A Japan for its dark realities. It is a stark moral landscape. Murder becomes a philosophical statement. An act of rebellion. The novel takes the readers on a ride of the grotesque and the extreme. An underground and underworld of Japan. A place with dark little secrets hiding everywhere. A place full of lies. A place where people are always ready to sell you something, or rape you. Pedophiles on the prowl. It is a dark world, in Natsuo Kirino’s eyes, and there is no redemption. No one can help them. They have to remain false themselves, lie, and watch their backs. This is all that they can do.

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
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M. Mary