Items related to Real World
A stunning new work of the feminist noir that Natsuo Kirino defined and made her own in her novels Out and Grotesque.
In a crowded residential suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls indifferently wade their way through a hot, smoggy summer and endless “cram school” sessions meant to ensure entry into good colleges. There’s Toshi, the dependable one; Terauchi, the great student; Yuzan, the sad one, grieving over the death of her mother—and trying to hide her sexual orientation from her friends; and Kirarin, the sweet one, whose late nights and reckless behavior remain a secret from those around her. When Toshi’s next-door neighbor is found brutally murdered, the girls suspect the killer is the neighbor’s son, a high school boy they nickname Worm. But when he flees, taking Toshi’s bike and cell phone with him, the four girls get caught up in a tempest of dangers—dangers they never could have even imagined—that rises from within them as well as from the world around them.
Psychologically intricate and astute, dark and unflinching, Real World is a searing, eye-opening portrait of teenage life in Japan unlike any we have seen before.
In a crowded residential suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls indifferently wade their way through a hot, smoggy summer and endless “cram school” sessions meant to ensure entry into good colleges. There’s Toshi, the dependable one; Terauchi, the great student; Yuzan, the sad one, grieving over the death of her mother—and trying to hide her sexual orientation from her friends; and Kirarin, the sweet one, whose late nights and reckless behavior remain a secret from those around her. When Toshi’s next-door neighbor is found brutally murdered, the girls suspect the killer is the neighbor’s son, a high school boy they nickname Worm. But when he flees, taking Toshi’s bike and cell phone with him, the four girls get caught up in a tempest of dangers—dangers they never could have even imagined—that rises from within them as well as from the world around them.
Psychologically intricate and astute, dark and unflinching, Real World is a searing, eye-opening portrait of teenage life in Japan unlike any we have seen before.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Natsuo Kirino, born in 1951, is the author of eighteen novels, four short-story collections, and an essay collection. She is the recipient of six of Japan’s premier literary awards, including the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Out and the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature for Grotesque. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages, and several of her books have been turned into movies. Out was the first of her novels to appear in English and was nominated for an Edgar Award. She lives in Tokyo.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter OneNinna Hori
I’m penciling in my eyebrows when the smog alert siren starts blaring. It’s happened every day since summer vacation started, so it’s no surprise. “May I have your attention,” this woman’s voice drawls over a loudspeaker. “An air pollution advisory has just been issued,” and the siren continues to drone on, like some kindly old dinosaur groaning away.
Most of these advisories happen in the morning, usually just as I’m about to leave for cram school. Nobody does anything because of them. Everyone kind of goes, Oh, that again. What I’d like to know is where they hide those speakers. To me, that’s creepier and weirder than anything about smog.
I live in a crowded residential area on the outskirts of Suginami-ku in Tokyo. It used to be a nice, laid-back neighborhood, but all the old, larger houses got torn down, replaced by smaller single-family homes and apartments. When I was little, several neat but tiny buildings went up where there used to be plum orchards and farm fields. They slapped fancy names on these—Estates or whatever—to help sell units. Nice-looking families moved in, and on weekends you’d see them out walking their dogs or driving around in expensive foreign cars. But the paved roads that run through the neighborhood, which must have been just dirt farm paths at one time, are so narrow that I heard the family two houses down from us had so much trouble parking their Mercedes-Benz in their garage that they ended up getting rid of it.
The siren keeps on droning. Right in between one of its groans, I hear a loud sound, something breaking next door. Our houses are so close that if you open the window, you can hear the parents yelling at each other, or the phone ringing. I’m thinking maybe a window broke. Seven years ago the boy who lives in the house diagonally across from us kicked a soccer ball that shattered a window in our house in the room where we keep our Buddhist altar. The kid completely ignored what happened, and later on he was transferred to a school in Kansai. I remember the abandoned soccer ball sitting there under the eaves of my house forever.
Anyway, the sound I’d heard was just like that time. There aren’t any little kids living next door, so it’s weird to hear something shatter so loudly, and the whole thing was kind of alarming. Maybe a burglar broke in. My heart beating like mad, I listened carefully but didn’t hear anything else. Total silence.
The neighbors moved in two years ago. We’ve had hardly anything to do with them. Sometimes, when I take the neighborhood association bulletin to them, I’ll press the intercom bell and the mother will come out, this phony smile pasted on her face. All I know for sure is that there’s a mom and a dad, and a boy the same age as me who lives there. Sometimes the mother is out front, sweeping with a bamboo broom. She has on silver-framed glasses and this bright red lipstick you know is going to leave marks on any teacup she uses. Get rid of the glasses and the lipstick, though, and I don’t think I’d recognize her.
Once when the woman next door saw me in my school uniform she asked, “Are you a high school student?” When I said yes, she said, “So is our son,” and named the prestigious high school he attended, smiling happily. When I told my mom this, she clicked her tongue and looked disgusted. The woman was obviously bragging about her son and Mom must have thought she was insulting us, since I was going to a less-than-stellar private girls’ school. But I just thought the woman next door was simple and naive, and I felt sorry for the boy for having such an embarrassing mother.
This son of hers was a lanky, stoop-shouldered boy with small, gloomy eyes. Reminded me of a worm. He had a sluggish way of walking with his head tilted to one side, and zero in the way of spirit. Even when our paths happened to cross at the station he’d avoid looking at me and edge off into the shadows of the building. Like if he stepped into the shadows he could hide from the world. In that sense he was just like his father, who looked like a typical office worker. The father ignored me as if I didn’t even exist. Once I went out to get the evening paper when he was just coming home. I nodded to him but he gazed off into the distance like I was invisible.
“I wonder what that guy does for a living, anyway,” my mother once said. “Kind of stuck-up with that ascot of his.” Who cares about ascot ties? was my reaction. To me people are divided into two groups: the nice and the un-nice. And the family next door was definitely in the second category. If my grandmother were still alive she would have sniffed out all kinds of gossip about them, but my mother couldn’t be bothered, so the only details we knew about them were that their son looked like a worm, the mother wore red lipstick, and the father, an ascot.
Still, I couldn’t figure out what that sound was. A burglar could break into their house for all I cared, but I didn’t want him coming into ours. I started to panic. My parents were both at work, I had slept in late and was about to have some cup ramen before heading out to summer cram school—I was a senior in high school—and the last thing I wanted was for some burglar to flee into our place. Dad always said that the scariest thing was a thief who gets cornered and turns violent.
I heard another crash, this one louder than the first. It rang in my ears, and I flinched and messed up my left eyebrow. Maybe I should redo it, I was thinking, staring into the mirror, when my cell phone on the table buzzed.
“Yo!” It could only be Terauchi. “Dude, it’s me.”
“I just heard this weird sound from next door—maybe a robber or something. What should I do?”
But Terauchi wasn’t paying any attention.
“That essay on Mori Ogai we’re supposed to write? I’ve done over a hundred pages, right? Just kidding . . . But I think it’s going to turn out okay, know what I mean?” She rambled on like this for a minute or so.
“Terauchi. Listen to me. A burglar might have broken into the house next door.”
“Du—de!” Terauchi was finally surprised and her usual greeting now turned into an interjection. Terauchi was a cute-looking girl, but her voice was really low and cool. Among my friends, she was the smartest and the most interesting.
“I just heard glass shattering,” I said. “Someone breaking in, maybe.”
“Probably just the husband and wife having a fight.”
“At this time of the morning?” I said. “The guy next door should be at work.”
“Well, maybe the wife lost it and smashed a teacup or something. It’s gotta be that,” she declared. “You know, one time when my mom got into a fight with my dad’s mother she went nuts and tossed both of their teacups and plates out the second-story window.”
“Your mom’s kind of extreme.”
“You got that right,” Terauchi said. “She just casually tossed the plates and cups out, aiming at the stepping-stones in the garden. See, Dad was using the plates Yukinari used as a baby. Anyway, Toshi-chan, I wanted to see how you’re doing with your essay.”
Toshi-chan. My name’s Toshiko Yamanaka, the characters for Toshi meaning “ten and four,” because I was born on the fourth day of the tenth month, October. Obviously not a lot of thought went into naming me, but since I’ve hardly ever met anyone with the same characters, I don’t mind the name that much. Terauchi’s first name is Kazuko, which she can’t stand. Her grandfather in Akita gave her the name, apparently. My friends all call one another by their first names or by nicknames, except for Terauchi, who insists that we call her by her last name.
“The thing is, I haven’t done it yet,” I admitted.
When we got to be seniors our Japanese teacher assigned us to write an essay on Ogai’s story “The Dancing Girl.” Terauchi was always good at exams and assignments. Whenever we had to write a book report, she copied parts of some published essay on the book without the teachers ever catching on. I was a little too honest—honest to a fault, you could say—to try to get away with something like that. So unfortunately it took me a lot of time to finish up assignments and my grades were never as good as hers. I never thought of what she did as dishonest; I was kind of vaguely worried that someday her cleverness might really her get in trouble. I worried about her because I liked her so much.
She went on, rumbling in her low voice: “I was thinking of, like, doing a psychological analysis of the main character.”
“Including Elise?”
“Nah—not her. Her name’s in katakana. What’s his name—Oda?”
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.
“That’s not it,” a different voice replied. Now it was Yuzan on the phone. “She’s gonna do a psychological profile based on the Chinese characters used to write the name. Can you imagine getting away with that?”
“Yuzan, I didn’t know you were there,” I said.
I must have sounded a little disappointed. I wasn’t exactly happy to find out that she and Terauchi were hanging out without me. It made me feel left out. I really liked Terauchi, but Yuzan was harder to deal with. She had such extreme likes and dislikes. She hated smokers violently, for instance. Human garbage, she said. Which was kind of unfair from the smoker’s viewpoint. On the other hand, if she liked someb...
I’m penciling in my eyebrows when the smog alert siren starts blaring. It’s happened every day since summer vacation started, so it’s no surprise. “May I have your attention,” this woman’s voice drawls over a loudspeaker. “An air pollution advisory has just been issued,” and the siren continues to drone on, like some kindly old dinosaur groaning away.
Most of these advisories happen in the morning, usually just as I’m about to leave for cram school. Nobody does anything because of them. Everyone kind of goes, Oh, that again. What I’d like to know is where they hide those speakers. To me, that’s creepier and weirder than anything about smog.
I live in a crowded residential area on the outskirts of Suginami-ku in Tokyo. It used to be a nice, laid-back neighborhood, but all the old, larger houses got torn down, replaced by smaller single-family homes and apartments. When I was little, several neat but tiny buildings went up where there used to be plum orchards and farm fields. They slapped fancy names on these—Estates or whatever—to help sell units. Nice-looking families moved in, and on weekends you’d see them out walking their dogs or driving around in expensive foreign cars. But the paved roads that run through the neighborhood, which must have been just dirt farm paths at one time, are so narrow that I heard the family two houses down from us had so much trouble parking their Mercedes-Benz in their garage that they ended up getting rid of it.
The siren keeps on droning. Right in between one of its groans, I hear a loud sound, something breaking next door. Our houses are so close that if you open the window, you can hear the parents yelling at each other, or the phone ringing. I’m thinking maybe a window broke. Seven years ago the boy who lives in the house diagonally across from us kicked a soccer ball that shattered a window in our house in the room where we keep our Buddhist altar. The kid completely ignored what happened, and later on he was transferred to a school in Kansai. I remember the abandoned soccer ball sitting there under the eaves of my house forever.
Anyway, the sound I’d heard was just like that time. There aren’t any little kids living next door, so it’s weird to hear something shatter so loudly, and the whole thing was kind of alarming. Maybe a burglar broke in. My heart beating like mad, I listened carefully but didn’t hear anything else. Total silence.
The neighbors moved in two years ago. We’ve had hardly anything to do with them. Sometimes, when I take the neighborhood association bulletin to them, I’ll press the intercom bell and the mother will come out, this phony smile pasted on her face. All I know for sure is that there’s a mom and a dad, and a boy the same age as me who lives there. Sometimes the mother is out front, sweeping with a bamboo broom. She has on silver-framed glasses and this bright red lipstick you know is going to leave marks on any teacup she uses. Get rid of the glasses and the lipstick, though, and I don’t think I’d recognize her.
Once when the woman next door saw me in my school uniform she asked, “Are you a high school student?” When I said yes, she said, “So is our son,” and named the prestigious high school he attended, smiling happily. When I told my mom this, she clicked her tongue and looked disgusted. The woman was obviously bragging about her son and Mom must have thought she was insulting us, since I was going to a less-than-stellar private girls’ school. But I just thought the woman next door was simple and naive, and I felt sorry for the boy for having such an embarrassing mother.
This son of hers was a lanky, stoop-shouldered boy with small, gloomy eyes. Reminded me of a worm. He had a sluggish way of walking with his head tilted to one side, and zero in the way of spirit. Even when our paths happened to cross at the station he’d avoid looking at me and edge off into the shadows of the building. Like if he stepped into the shadows he could hide from the world. In that sense he was just like his father, who looked like a typical office worker. The father ignored me as if I didn’t even exist. Once I went out to get the evening paper when he was just coming home. I nodded to him but he gazed off into the distance like I was invisible.
“I wonder what that guy does for a living, anyway,” my mother once said. “Kind of stuck-up with that ascot of his.” Who cares about ascot ties? was my reaction. To me people are divided into two groups: the nice and the un-nice. And the family next door was definitely in the second category. If my grandmother were still alive she would have sniffed out all kinds of gossip about them, but my mother couldn’t be bothered, so the only details we knew about them were that their son looked like a worm, the mother wore red lipstick, and the father, an ascot.
Still, I couldn’t figure out what that sound was. A burglar could break into their house for all I cared, but I didn’t want him coming into ours. I started to panic. My parents were both at work, I had slept in late and was about to have some cup ramen before heading out to summer cram school—I was a senior in high school—and the last thing I wanted was for some burglar to flee into our place. Dad always said that the scariest thing was a thief who gets cornered and turns violent.
I heard another crash, this one louder than the first. It rang in my ears, and I flinched and messed up my left eyebrow. Maybe I should redo it, I was thinking, staring into the mirror, when my cell phone on the table buzzed.
“Yo!” It could only be Terauchi. “Dude, it’s me.”
“I just heard this weird sound from next door—maybe a robber or something. What should I do?”
But Terauchi wasn’t paying any attention.
“That essay on Mori Ogai we’re supposed to write? I’ve done over a hundred pages, right? Just kidding . . . But I think it’s going to turn out okay, know what I mean?” She rambled on like this for a minute or so.
“Terauchi. Listen to me. A burglar might have broken into the house next door.”
“Du—de!” Terauchi was finally surprised and her usual greeting now turned into an interjection. Terauchi was a cute-looking girl, but her voice was really low and cool. Among my friends, she was the smartest and the most interesting.
“I just heard glass shattering,” I said. “Someone breaking in, maybe.”
“Probably just the husband and wife having a fight.”
“At this time of the morning?” I said. “The guy next door should be at work.”
“Well, maybe the wife lost it and smashed a teacup or something. It’s gotta be that,” she declared. “You know, one time when my mom got into a fight with my dad’s mother she went nuts and tossed both of their teacups and plates out the second-story window.”
“Your mom’s kind of extreme.”
“You got that right,” Terauchi said. “She just casually tossed the plates and cups out, aiming at the stepping-stones in the garden. See, Dad was using the plates Yukinari used as a baby. Anyway, Toshi-chan, I wanted to see how you’re doing with your essay.”
Toshi-chan. My name’s Toshiko Yamanaka, the characters for Toshi meaning “ten and four,” because I was born on the fourth day of the tenth month, October. Obviously not a lot of thought went into naming me, but since I’ve hardly ever met anyone with the same characters, I don’t mind the name that much. Terauchi’s first name is Kazuko, which she can’t stand. Her grandfather in Akita gave her the name, apparently. My friends all call one another by their first names or by nicknames, except for Terauchi, who insists that we call her by her last name.
“The thing is, I haven’t done it yet,” I admitted.
When we got to be seniors our Japanese teacher assigned us to write an essay on Ogai’s story “The Dancing Girl.” Terauchi was always good at exams and assignments. Whenever we had to write a book report, she copied parts of some published essay on the book without the teachers ever catching on. I was a little too honest—honest to a fault, you could say—to try to get away with something like that. So unfortunately it took me a lot of time to finish up assignments and my grades were never as good as hers. I never thought of what she did as dishonest; I was kind of vaguely worried that someday her cleverness might really her get in trouble. I worried about her because I liked her so much.
She went on, rumbling in her low voice: “I was thinking of, like, doing a psychological analysis of the main character.”
“Including Elise?”
“Nah—not her. Her name’s in katakana. What’s his name—Oda?”
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.
“That’s not it,” a different voice replied. Now it was Yuzan on the phone. “She’s gonna do a psychological profile based on the Chinese characters used to write the name. Can you imagine getting away with that?”
“Yuzan, I didn’t know you were there,” I said.
I must have sounded a little disappointed. I wasn’t exactly happy to find out that she and Terauchi were hanging out without me. It made me feel left out. I really liked Terauchi, but Yuzan was harder to deal with. She had such extreme likes and dislikes. She hated smokers violently, for instance. Human garbage, she said. Which was kind of unfair from the smoker’s viewpoint. On the other hand, if she liked someb...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 0307267571
- ISBN 13 9780307267573
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages224
- Rating
Buy New
Learn more about this copy
US$ 21.06
Shipping:
US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Stock Image
Real World
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0307267571
Buy New
US$ 21.06
Convert currency
Stock Image
Real World
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0307267571
Buy New
US$ 26.17
Convert currency
Stock Image
Real World
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0307267571
Buy New
US$ 27.68
Convert currency
Stock Image
Real World
Published by
New York Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. 2008
(2008)
ISBN 10: 0307267571
ISBN 13: 9780307267573
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover0307267571
Buy New
US$ 29.57
Convert currency
Stock Image
Real World
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. Seller Inventory # 0307267571-2-1
Buy New
US$ 52.13
Convert currency
Stock Image
Real World
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks65529
Buy New
US$ 59.00
Convert currency
Stock Image
Real World
Published by
Alfred a Knopf Inc
(2008)
ISBN 10: 0307267571
ISBN 13: 9780307267573
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Brand New. 224 pages. 9.00x6.00x0.75 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # 0307267571
Buy New
US$ 50.00
Convert currency
Stock Image
Real World Kirino, Natsuo and Gabriel, Philip
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.84. Seller Inventory # Q-0307267571
Buy New
US$ 58.53
Convert currency