Real World

by Natsuo Kirino

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307387488
• ISBN13: 9780307387486
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Powerful & Amazing

I just finished reading this book barely 3 hours ago. It's such an amazing book, I wasn't sure if I would like it reading the back cover, but the reviews pushed me to buy it. I must say it was impossible getting me to stop reading it. It lets you into the mind of the main characters and it's just so amazing the words and the dialogue are so fluid and beautiful. It really is such a powerful book and the ending was so spectacular in all the best ways. I never saw it coming, it was so shocking and amazing. It completely recommend it to teenagers especially, it was almost creepy how I was able to connect to all the characters on some level.

Private Thoughts, Public Faces

Although Toshi Yamanaka is still officially on her summer holidays, she's isn't having the most enjoyable break - in an attempt to get the best grades possible, she's having to attend cram school. She lives in Suginami-ku, a residential area Tokyo that's grown a little more crowded in recent years. The family who loves next door to Toshi moved in two years ago, and they haven't made a great impression...the parents comes across as snobbish, while the son seems a little strange. Although he and Toshi are around the same age, they have never actually spoken - and, because of his demeanour, Toshi has nicknamed him 'Worm'. One morning, just as she's on her way out to cram school, Toshio hears a couple of strange crashes from the Worm's apartment - at first she worries Worm's home is being burgled, but she's a little relieved when she sees Worm leaving the building. Toshi and Worm have never actually spoken, but he hasn't made much of an impression - she views him as a nerdy, gloomy loner, someone who doesn't have a lot of life or spirit about him. Any time their paths have ever crossed, he's been unable to look Toshi in the eye, and always shuffled off towards the shadows. Today, however, he's behaving a little out of character when she meets him - he seems a little more confident about himself, in generally good form...he even stretches himself by actually speaking to Toshi. The day's strange start takes a lousy turn : on leaving school, Toshi discovers her bike and her mobile phone have both been stolen. When she gets home, a schoolfriend calls on the landline - who mentions that Toshi's mobile has just been answered by a young, weird-sounding guy. Worm, of course, is the obvious suspect... Toshi's barely put the phone down, when her mother arrives home in a panic - Worm's mother has been found murdered. It seems she was killed in the family apartment, roughly around the time Toshi met Worm that morning. Like Toshi, the police view Worm as the prime suspect...but, for some reason, Toshi says nothing to them about meeting Worm, hearing the noises in his apartment or about losing her bike and phone. However, it doesn't take her three closest friends long in finding out - Worm, with his teenage hormones playing up, has spoken to each of then on Toshi's mobile before the day was finished. (Worm's teenage hormones have got him into trouble before). Toshi's three friends are Terauchi , Yuzan and Kirarin - it's a pretty tight-knit group, with only Kirarin having friends outside of this circle. Each one views themselves very differently to how their friends view them...the complications in their lives and the belief that their friends wouldn't fully understand them contributes to the sense of isolation each one feels. It's an element that's particularly emphasized, as each character - Toshi, Yuzan, Kirarin, Terauchi and Worm - tells part of the story, in their own words, as it happens to them. Naturally, each has a slightly different take on things...

"Real World" is Modern-Day Japan

"Real World" is not just a book about Japan and young Japanese people, it is, in fact a written semi-fictional recording of modern-day Japan as it really has become these days. I should know, I live in Tokyo. I have lived here over 15 years and I have seen it all change so very much. And these days young Japanese are just like Worm and Toshi in so many ways, and THAT is what make this so book so significant and horrifying! Also Kirino is right on the mark with her portrayals of Japanese brainwashed college students, teachers, parents and the overkill 'Authority Rules' group mind that is destroying young individual students before they can even graduate. Get this book and read it. You may not believe some of it, but, believe me, its all too true. Five stars.

A Powerfully Affecting Glimpse into the Dark Hearts of Japan's Adolescents

It is difficult to imagine what the Japanese reading audience makes of Natsuo Kirino's dark, nihilistic portrayals of her native country, but her success there as a mystery writer suggests that they must find in her work a compelling mirror of themselves. However, Ms. Kirino's bleak, female-centered representation of Japanese society in OUT, GROTESQUE, and now REAL WORLD creates a milieu at least as horrifying as any of the bloody, heartless actions performed by her characters. Her only three novels so far to be translated into English may feature cruel murders and shocking dismemberments, but for many Western readers, inscrutable Japan may well be her books' most terrifying character. As she did in OUT, her first novel to be translated into English, Ms. Kirino centers her attention in REAL WORLD on four female friends. This time, however, her focus shifts from the adult world (the four lead characters in OUT were all night shift workers at a box lunch factory) to that of adolescent teens in the summer before their senior years of high school. The four girls are teen archetypes: Toshi the straight arrow, Terauchi the intellectual, Yuzan the boyish lesbian not yet quite out of the closet, and Kirarin the secretively adventuresome one. Cram school and study sessions to prepare for their upcoming college entrance exams weigh heavily upon them, as oppressive and enveloping as summer humidity. Each girl faces the uncertainties of young adulthood with trepidation - college, or not; dreary life with an office lady career and marriage to a salary man, or something less stultifying than their parents' lives; remaining a virgin, or hooking up; accepting one's sexual identity, or conforming. Each maintains her public front among her best friends, schoolmates, and family as though wandering through a masked ball, all the while wrestling with far deeper internal conflicts, resentments, hatreds, and insecurities. Even their names are signifying masks. Toshi, for example (whose full given name Toshiko means nothing more than ten and four, representing her birth date of October 4), adopts the alter ego Ninna Hori, Japanese characters for a temple moat. Yuzan, on the other hand, is really Kyomi Kaibara; her name Yuzan was borrowed from the father character in a popular manga series. Into the midst of this angst-ridden circle of teen females falls Toshi's teen-aged boy neighbor, nicknamed Worm by the girls, who has just murdered his mother with a baseball bat and escaped to the countryside on Toshi's bicycle. The four girls are drawn into the Worm's orbit like moths to a flame: Toshi aids Worm's escape by refusing to answer questions from the police detective, Yuzan loans him her bicycle and buys him a new cell phone, and Kirarin joins him "on the run." Seemingly small acts matter, and unintended consequences abound. Each girl in her own way is fascinated by his willingness to act, to strike out without concern for the consequences against the aspects of his