In her purview, it was like that from the beginning, when as a teenager she slept with an adult friend of her father’s.

She thinks of herself as a “natural-born whore”, a creature of the flesh doomed only to exist in the context of a man’s sexuality.

It’s Yuriko who ends up the prostitute, and if her excerpted diary entries are to be believed, she has embraced that as her karma rather than out of anything practical. One settles into a life of respectable work, a veneer that barely conceals an ocean of rage the other into prostitution and an early death at the hands of a client. The rift that forms between them soon becomes unbridgeable, and before long the two sisters live entirely disparate lives. The unpleasant union of her Swiss/Polish father (himself “half”, it seems) and her Japanese mother produced herself and Yuriko-the “monster”, as the narrator calls her, a girl almost too beautiful to be believed. Told in an amalgam of first-person confessional, third-party documentation, diary entries and letter-writings, Grotesque deals with a now-middle-aged Japanese woman-never referred to by her first name-who was one of two daughters in a mixed marriage. But I got here late: I’m a reader and a critic, not an editor, and so I have to take Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque as it stands: a very good book that might well be a great one, barring my quibbles about its length. On the other hand, I want to red-pencil the book, to trim out the fat I know is there and expose the muscle and heart of a story that has about one hundred percent more, well, story, than it truly needs. On the one hand I want to write a rave review of Grotesque, one that might verge on being fulsome in its praise.

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