What I want to talk about today (and forgive me if this seems self-indulgent, but I guess most of my Livejournal is massively self-indulgent so that's nothing new) is Real World.

See, a few years back now I discovered Natsuo Kirino. I'm no longer the kind of hopeless weeaboo who'll read anything just because it was written by a Japanese author, but I must admit I was very much suckered in by the cover of Out, because it looked like a damn good book and there's just something about a picture of a demure Japanese lady holding a butcher knife that'll do that to me. Besides, good covers sell books - no shame in that.

There are three books by Kirino in translation at the moment: Out, Grotesque, and Real World. I've got all three, new. I bought a second copy of Out to give to my mother for Christmas last year, after my dad told me she'd discovered Kathy Reichs. I love the fact that they focus on women - I was always a feminist, but the older I get the more pronounced my feminist streak's getting: watch this space for a HEY SLASH FANGIRLS, BACK THE FUCK OFF THE FEMALE CHARACTERS rant! - most of the major characters in Kirino's novels are female, and most of them are determinedly non-stereotypical. They're active and resorceful, and very often dangerous and far darker than they appear, and they very definitely aren't totally defined by men or existing subsidiary to them. I really love that exploration of the dark, sinister inner lives of totally ordinary-looking women.

(They also all have really awesome covers.)

I'd try and summarize Real World but as I tend to get spoilery and stuff and I want to finish this entry sometime before Doomsday, I've decided not to bother. I'm just going to copy the blurb instead. According to John it's really difficult to write blurbs, so they deserve a little more positive attention even if it does come in the form of an idiot Englishwoman and her fangirl LJ.

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls drift through a hot smoggy August and tedious summer school classes. There's dependable Toshi, brainy Terauchi, Yuzan, grief-stricken and confused, and Kirarin, whose late nights and reckless behavior remain a secret from those around her.

Then Toshi's next-door neighbor is found brutally murdered and the girls suspect Worm, the neighbor's son and a high-school misfit. But when he disappears (having stolen Toshi's bike and mobile) the four girls become irresistibly drawn into a treacherous vortex of brutality and seduction which rises from within themselves as well as the world around them.

So. The last book of Kirino's I read, Grotesque, was... well, a little disappointing. It wasn't so much because of the story - that I liked. It was because I found the central narrator, a woman who is never named in the story, to be an incredibly shallow, arrogant, self-righteous and almost immediately infuriating character - not to mention the very definition of an 'unreliable narrator'. I've got no problem with unreliable narrators and I'm pretty sure she was supposed to be an unappealing character: my problem is Kirino succeeded a little too well in making her unappealing, so much so that I had no real sympathy for her or her problems. I didn't like her sections of the book much, she was such a narrow-minded prig. It was kind of fun, though, trying to piece together what actually happened in between all these ridiculously biased narrators.

(In fact, almost all the book's narrators were deeply annoying for one reason or another. The only one I felt any sympathy for was Yuriko, the protagonist's beautiful, corrupt younger sister. I bore with Kazue, who was also arrogant, self-absorbed and self-deluding, largely because I knew she was going to get murdered - this was no great feat of deduction though, as we're told she gets murdered on page eight - and she annoyed me, so I wanted to be there when it happened.)

Real World felt to me like a return to form. Though it again contained multiple narrators and many of them were also self-absorbed, self-deluding and rather silly, I had a lot more sympathy with them. It might have helped that the book was comparatively shorter and they didn't have time to outstay their welcome; it might have been because they were teenagers, and teenagers can get away with behaving like that - largely because in most cases all a teenager needs to snap out of it is a few more years. With adults, both in fiction and reality, it's pretty obvious that unless something happens to radically change their worldview, that's who they are for life. I've got far less patience for narrow-minded, egocentric adults, despite the sneaking suspicion that I may well be one...

This time, I generally sympathized with most of the characters, though I certainly didn't agree with all their actions. I'm still young enough to remember being an alienated teenager. I really felt for Yuzun for a number of reasons: it was both sad and comic that she had determined to keep a secret from the other girls, and in the course of her friends' monologues it emerged they all knew already.

Grotesque wasn't bad, it just wasn't Out, which was frankly stunning: but it certainly didn't put me off getting Kirino's next book. I bought Real World on Saturday, I think - pretty good going since it only came out in paperback on the 4th. Anyway, it was the same day I went into town with John to meet up with a friend of his who turned out to be extremely interesting and very, very talkative. We ate at Bella Italia and we all got wet and they spent a fair amount of time in music shops, and given that I'm about as musical as the average house brick I decided to buy the book to give me something to do while they debated the various merits of various acoustic guitars. I then spent most of the rest of the afternoon being very antisocial and sleepy and devouring my book. Much to John's credit he didn't try and smack me one for this.

I finished the book this morning (it wasn't, like I said, exactly long). Needless to say I really enjoyed it.

That said, though, a quick check of Amazon reminded me why I tend to steer clear of reviews of things I like. I'm really not sure I agree with some of the points raised in the Kirkus review - the whole thing can be found on the novel's Amazon page - most specifically with this passage:

The language in which their dialogue is rendered is often stiff and unconvincing. Even in a culture that places a high value on scholastic testing, it's hard to believe that kids would use vocabulary-test words like "blithely" and "dumbfounded" in their internal monologues. And, in the moments before Worm first decides to kill his mother, the worst epithet he can muster is "old bag." Like teens pretty much everywhere, Japanese kids are known for their inventive patois; one would hope that a kid driven to matricide could muster a lively expletive or two.

First off, I don't really agree with the assertion that teenagers are inarticulate and incapable of using 'vocabulary-test words' simply by virtue of being teenagers. I may be slowly but surely losing touch with what it was like to be eighteen, but as a literate and (I like to believe) intelligent teenager I knew what blithe and dumbfounded meant when I was in my teens because I read a fucking book from time to time, and wouldn't have been above using them if they were the best words appropriate for the situation. Maybe I could buy this if the characters in question were supposed to be fourteen or so, but eighteen? They're practically adults - and they're all pretty intelligent, too. Why shouldn't they be articulate? The whole point of these kids is that they're not stupid.

My other complaint? Of course the kid's not swearing the air blue. He's Japanese. Yes, teenagers use patois - but the reviewer seems unaware that bad language (or 'lively expletives', as the reviewer puts it) really is not infused into Japanese culture in the same way it is into the Western. Swearing, in Japan, is still considered to be very taboo in many situations, not just in the workplace or in public.

Furthermore, the Japanese language isn't exactly replete with expletives anyway. Sure they have curse-words, but they're really not very colorful or inventive. Literal translations of the words the Japanese often use when cursing often reveals them to be very mild indeed: anyone who's at all familiar with watching subtitled Japanese movies or anime could have told this reviewer that. The word 'idiot' I've seen used in situations where most English-speakers would use something far stronger. A word that is commonly translated as 'bastard' is, translated literally, just a very rough form of the word 'you'. The phrase 'old bag' may well be the translation of 'obasan' - literally auntie - which is often considered an offensive thing to call an older Japanese woman, never mind your own mother!

I'm not so much offended that the review slams a book I like as I am by the reviewer's presumption that an eighteen year old - someone who, where I come from, is an adult - should be by necessity rude and incoherent simply because they're eighteen years old.