Natsuo Kirino

• Born: October 7, 1951
• Place of Birth: Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; inverted; psychological

Contribution

Japanese crime writer Natsuo Kirino first became known to English readers with the publication of Out, Stephen Snyder's 2003 translation of Auto (1997), her harrowing tale of four apparently demure women suddenly engaging in murder and body dismemberment. The success of Out led to Rebecca L. Copeland's 2007 translation of Gurotesuku (2003; Grotesque), a mystery in which Kirino continues her focus on women and crime. Grotesque, the story of a double murder of two Tokyo sex workers, reveals as much about a perpetrator’s deviant mind as it does about the severe peer pressures and bullying confronting young Japanese women.

In Japan, Kirino’s crime fiction has won her ten major awards. Out was nominated for the 2004 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel, the first nomination for a translation from Japanese. She also received the Japanese Medal of Honor for her contribution to literature in 2015. With her strong focus on female protagonists and perpetrators, Kirino is part of a group of innovative Japanese female crime writers such as who have been challenging, changing, and developing crime fiction in Japan since the 1990s. Kirino’s combination of deep psychological insights and her stark depiction of social and economic pressures has made her crime fiction internationally popular.

Kirino's other translated novels include Riaru Wārudo (2003; Real World, 2008), translated by Philip Gabriel and winner of the 2008 Murasaki Shikibu Prize, Joshinki (2008; The Goddess Chronicle, 2013), translated by Rebecca L. Copeland. She also published several short stories that were translated into English, including Philip Gabriel's translations of "Tōkyō-jima" (2010; "Tokyo Island") and "Yagi no Me wa Sora o Aoku Utsusu ka" (2010; "In Goats' Eyes Is the Sky Blue?"), and "Ukishima no Mori" (2011; "The Floating Forest"), published in the anthology Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan (2011) and translated by Jonathan W. Lawless.

Biography

Natsuo Kirino was born Mariko Hashioka on October 7, 1951, in Kanazawa, capital of Ishikawa Prefecture. She began her life in one of the few Japanese cities that was not firebombed in World War II and thus contained a treasure of traditional architecture. Her father, a peripatetic architect, soon moved the family to Sendai and Sapporo, before relocating to Tokyo when Kirino was fourteen years old. Kirino attracted attention as an imaginative teenager who loved to read.

After obtaining her law degree in 1974 from Seikei University in Tokyo, Kirino found no appropriate employment and worked as an organizer of film festivals and as a magazine editor and writer. Later, she would say that during this period, she had a rough time and no good job at all. In 1975, she married, and in 1981, her daughter was born. For a while, she tried her luck as a scenario writer for films before writing her first romance in 1984.

Kirino turned to mystery writing and was influenced by Japanese writers , Fumiko Hayashi, and Ryu Murakami, as well as by Western writers such as , , , and . Her breakthrough came in 1993, when she was writing under the pseudonym Natsuo Kirino. Her mystery Kao ni furikakaru ame (1993; the rain that falls on the face) won the prestigious Edogawa Rampo Award in 1993 and launched her career as a major crime writer in Japan. Her protagonist, female private detective Miro Murano, made one more appearance in Tenshi ni misuterareta yoru (1994; the night abandoned by angels) before Kirino turned away from serial fiction.

Kirino’s next success was Out, which saw an initial printing run of five hundred thousand copies in Japan and won her the 1998 Mystery Writers of Japan Award. Translated into English and other foreign languages, the novel established Kirino’s international fame as an original mystery writer. Her fiction focuses on the social forces driving contemporary women over the edge into committing crimes of astonishing ferocity.

Kirino’s novel Yawarakana hoho (1999; soft cheeks) won the important Naoki Prize, awarded annually since 1935 to the best young author of popular fiction. Her Grotesque won the Izumi Kyoka Literary Award, Zangyakuki (2004; record of cruelty) won the Shibata Renzaburo Award, and Tamamoe! (2005; a soul burns) received the Fujinkoron Literary Award. Kirino has also published short story collections, and a number of her mysteries have been made into Japanese films. Out was turned into a film in 2002, and New Line Cinema picked up the rights for a high-production-value remake.

Kirino and several other female Japanese crime writers have added a decisively new, female perspective to modern Japanese mysteries. No longer working with serial characters, Kirino is attracted to psychological realism, eschewing the flights into the supernatural of her contemporary Miyuki Miyabe. Kirino prefers to explore the noir world of Japanese society in the throes of economic and gender depression. Sadly for the society, her imaginative tales of murder and mayhem increasingly find themselves mirrored by the reality of ever more bizarre murder cases in Japan. In January 2007, the confession of a woman who murdered and dismembered her husband and dumped the body parts across Tokyo uncannily echoed the plot of Out.

Analysis

The publication of English translations of the work of Japanese crime writer Natsuo Kirino has garnered a loyal English-speaking readership. Her readers appreciate Kirino’s stark, laconically told tales of evil spreading out against the dark backdrop of a modern Japan that is in the grip of economic stagnation and social alienation. As rendered by her translators, Kirino’s style is cold, detached, yet observant, painfully direct, and to the point. The reader is instantly reminded of the classic American hard-boiled detective stories.

Kirino is part of a wave of Japanese female crime writers whose focus on women and crime has invigorated the mystery genre beginning in the early 1990s. By making women active agents in their crime stories, these writers bring new experiences and insights to the genre. Kirino’s crime novels all place stylistic emphasis on a remorseless and relentless revelation of the dark side of modern Japanese society. Kirino’s key interest lies in revealing the psychological and social makeup of outsiders, or grotesque characters. Her narratives favor ambiguity and multiplicity.

Those whose profession it is to solve crimes figure only marginally in Kirino’s translated mysteries. In Out, one of the perpetrators remarks of Detective Imai, the police officer who comes closest to figuring out the first murder, that he draws the wrong conclusions from correct observations, in part because of his gender bias. In Grotesque, the police are a mere trigger to force the prime suspect to tell the story from his point of view. Significantly, the crimes of Out are never solved or punished, nor is the perpetrator of the second murder in Grotesque revealed by the end of the novel.

At the heart of Kirino’s literary mysteries are modern Japanese women who choose, for a variety of reasons, to drop out of respectable society. In Japan, this is perhaps the most shocking aspect of Kirino’s crime fiction. Her female characters forcefully reject the social tradition of being meek, subordinate, conciliatory, and willing to suffer for the sake of peace and harmony in family and society and at work. For them, crime becomes an alternative to a bullying, harassing, and discriminatory society.

A central theme of Kirino’s crime novels is the utter loneliness of her characters. Generally, this loneliness comes from a total lack of love that begins in the family and continues in the realm of sexuality. Indeed, both Out and Grotesque describe modern Japanese families that resemble war in hell. At the root of the breakdown of the family, Kirino’s narratives suggest, lies crass materialism, egoism, and relentless selfishness not tempered by any moral or ethical standards in the age of abject consumerism.

This idea that money has permeated and destroyed the family and romantic love alike is a strong theme in Kirino’s crime fiction. In the absence of love to govern intimate human relationships, money becomes the medium through which characters seek to define their status and power in their interactions with each other. In an economically stagnant capitalist society, the fight for money becomes bitter and quickly turns violent. Not surprisingly, once money replaces love in human relationships, the issue of selling sex for money appears. Sex work figures centrally in Grotesque. In this work, at least one of the two murders of sex workers occurs because one sex worker demands more money for the extra work of letting a client indulge in his incestuous fantasy.

Kirino’s mysteries also openly reveal the persistent nature of severe gender discrimination in contemporary Japan. Masako Katori, the strongest personality of the criminal quartet of Out, experienced job discrimination firsthand for more than twenty years at her former banking job. Even the extraordinary beauty of Yuriko Hirata in Grotesque fails her professionally as a fashion trend passes her by.

When Kirino’s women leave ordinary society, these departures are far more self-destructive and less glamorous than those made by the typical disaffected young men who turn to crime in most Japanese crime fiction. There is a bitterness, harshness, self-loathing, and self-destructiveness to female crime in Kirino’s work that keeps readers on edge. This bitterness disallows cozy, romantic delusions about the nature of crime and the cost it extracts from the criminal and the victims.

A final poignant literary characteristic of Kirino’s fiction is her expressive use of multiple narratives. In Out, chapters and sections are written from the third-person perspective of a full variety of characters. The climactic showdown is rendered twice, first from the view of the villain and then from that of survivor Masako. In Grotesque, the story of the murder of two sex workers is told by various characters in first-person narratives. The characters address the reader either directly or through their journals or written confessions. By juxtaposing different perspectives throughout her mysteries, Kirino creates a permanent state of uncertainty. Unusual for the crime genre, there is no authoritative master narrative in Kirino’s mysteries that finally reassures the reader which of the many voices one is to trust.

Out

Indicative of the tightness of its plot, the bleakness of the setting in which Kirino’s acclaimed thriller Out opens and ends corresponds to the bleakness of the lives of its female protagonists. Kirino deftly introduces her cast of four middle-aged women, each representative of an aspect of Japanese womanhood, as their night shift begins at a lunchbox-meal factory. Masako Katori picked this blue-collar job after suffering gender bias and harassment at her banking job. Widowed Yoshie Azumi keeps working to provide for her ungrateful bed-ridden mother-in-law and equally ungrateful youngest daughter. Kuniko Jonouchi, the youngest and vainest, needs money to pay off debts from her spending sprees. Yayoi Yamamoto works to help earn the down payment for a family home.

One night, Yayoi reveals that her husband, Kenji, has gambled away their savings while courting a Chinese club hostess. When Yayoi confronted him, he beat her. The next evening, Yayoi strangles Kenji in an explosion of hatred for an unfaithful, abusive husband who has betrayed her, rejected her, and robbed her of her most cherished dream of a harmonious family life. Her coworkers, who are called to help or who stumble on the process, cooperate as professionally as if they were at work and dismember Kenji’s body in Masako’s bathroom so that it fits into forty-three garbage bags.

Kuniko’s laziness, which causes her to dump her share of the bags in public park containers rather than closed residential trash bins, leads to their discovery. However, the police arrest Misuyoshi Satake, owner of the club where Kenji lost his money and a former hit man who was jailed for seven years for the sadistic rape-murder of a rebellious sex worker. Out chillingly demonstrates that the police cannot grasp the true motive leading to the murder and dismemberment of Kenji.

Released for lack of evidence but ruined financially, Satake swears revenge on the women he suspects. As Satake hones in on his first victim, Kuniko, Out unsentimentally exposes the vast alienation and loneliness in modern Japan. In the climax, Masako fights for her life in the abandoned factory where Satake has dragged her. It is Masako’s will to live, the narrative implies, that allows her to win the battle. Freeing herself from all familial and social bonds, she is ready to move out of Japan completely, avoiding any punishment.

Grotesque

In the psychological crime novel Grotesque, Kirino combines the investigation of the murder of two Tokyo sex workers with a chilling picture of hatred and self-loathing among its female characters. Being bullied and sexually hurt and failing in spite of their best efforts all happen to the young women in Grotesque. By the end of the novel, almost all the women consider themselves grotesquely disfigured by their resulting hatred.

Grotesque opens as a murderer has struck twice within one year and strangled to death two very different victims. Yuriko Hirata descended to streetwalking after being a sought-after call girl in high school and experiencing a brief stint as a model and fashionable escort. Kazue Satō, however, was a professional manager by day and plied the same streets as Yuriko after dark. Through these two victims, the narrative suggests that in the absence of love at home and the hardship of enduring sexual predation and extreme bullying in a highly competitive, snobbish educational system symbolized by Kirino’s fictional Q preparatory school, high school, and university system, the psyche of young women is disfigured.

For the plot, Kirino relishes in using multiple first-person narratives. Yuriko’s unnamed elder sister expresses lifelong sibling rivalry. Yuriko and her sister are both Eurasians whose Japanese mother killed herself when their egoistic father relocated the family to his native Switzerland. The older sister hates Yuriko for her good looks, which are missing in her own physiognomy. Yuriko speaks from the grave through her diary, which reveals the abyss of her soul. Her beauty turned out to be a curse.

At the trial, the police seem confident that the murders are the work of one man, the illegal Chinese immigrant Zhang Zhe-zhong. However, he stubbornly insists that he killed only Yuriko because she charged him extra for pretending to be his dead sister. Zhang may have murdered his own sister when illegally migrating to Japan, highlighting Kirino’s penchant for unresolved riddles in her mysteries. Zhang has a grotesquely deformed soul, reminiscent of that of the psychopathic Satake in Out.

The journals of Kazue Satō expose a soul damaged by incessant bullying at Q High School. She considers sex work an act of revenge on men and enters an ambiguous, masochistic relationship with Zhang.

The ending of Grotesque is indicative of Kirino’s interest in psychopathology and her disinclination to follow the mystery tradition of solving all crimes at the end of the story. In an effort to understand the two victims, Yuriko’s sister appears ready to assume the sex work that they did. The murder of Kazue remains unsolved.

What distinguishes Grotesque is Kirino’s trademark eye for the loneliness, alienation, and hostility in the life of her female characters. It appears that one cannot obtain love and happiness through beauty or intelligence, or even luck or hard work.

Bibliography

Harrison, Sophie. “Memoirs of a Geisha’s Sister.” New York Times Book Review, April 15, 2007, p. 15.

Kirino, Natsuo. "Kirino Natsuo: Bubblonia." www.kirino-natsuo.com. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

McInnes, Paul. "The Translated Novels of Natsuo Kirino." Tokyo Weekender, 24 July 2023, www.tokyoweekender.com/art‗and‗culture/natsuo-kirino-translated-novels. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Samul, Ron. "Review of Out." Review of One, by Natsuo Kirino. Library Journal, vol. 128, no. 11, June 15, 2003, p. 101.

Seaman, Amanda. Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan. University of Hawaii Press, 2004.

Seaman, Amanda. “Inside Out: Space, Gender and Power in Kirino Natsuo.” Japanese Language and Literature, vol. 40, no. 2, 2006, pp. 197-217.

Takayama, Hideko. “Breaking Out of Japan.” Newsweek International, Aug. 18, 2003, p. 50.

Vrabel, Leigh Anne. Review of Grotesque, by Natsuo Kirino. Library Journal, vol. 132, no. 4, March 1, 2007, pp. 74-75.