text: (3.75) The other reviews can reveal what this book is about. What I wanted to share is the extreme responses this book incited in my boyfriend and me. He alternately found himself loving the narrator, Yuriko's sister, for her brutal honesty and hating her for her malice and psychological bullying of Kazue. Meanwhile, I found myself rooting the narrator on as she spoke the cruel truth about the pitiful hopelessness of Kazue's meritocratic dreams, but a moment later I wondered if that made me a bully myself or as bitter and heartless as the narrator. Perhaps it reminded me too much of what I had seen growing up to shock me.
  
  Then, there was the simultaneous hilarity and pain of Kazue's cluelessness. Was she a tragic figure, blind, or both? I admired Kirino for inspiring me to feel so much for her characters, even for Yuriko, who is certainly not the ditsy airhead her older sister wants us to believe she is (I also found it hard to believ she was as ghastly as she considered herself in her 30s: is it just because women past 25 in Japan are regarded as Christmas cake, as a friend from Japan says?).
  
  My attention was quite strained by Zhang's tale of Chinese hardship (it seemed the wrong book to educate the reader about how difficult it is for immigrants in Japan), but I immediately forgave Kirino when Yuriko's older sister admitted herself Zhang's account was tedious and could be skipped (I'd recommend others to skim it as well).
  
  Again, my patience was tested by Kazue's journal: I just kept on thinking, aren't you ready to die yet? But I see this was intentional on Kirino's part, to make the reader struggle between our (or my) wanting Kazue to just give up on life and our feeling ashamed for our coldness and complicity in her bullying. It also made my boyfriend and me think concurrently of the people we loved in our own lives who were heading towards the same fate as Kazue and Yuriko, not through prostitution but through drugs.
  
  What did disappoint me in the end was the last chapter, which seemed a cop-out. If only an editor had suggested it was unconvincing and encouraged her that an alternative, though more shocking, would be more in line with the narrator's character, but that is wishful thinking on my part. When I give this book to others, which I will, I will make sure to discuss with them, when they've finished, what they thought of the ending.
  
  This book could have been edited down a hundred pages (back when it was written in Japanese), but for what it did offer, I have no regrets for its consuming my attention entirely and will always look forward to further translations of Kirino's books. This book may not be the masterpiece "Out" was, but for anyone who has gone to an elite school on scholarship, striven to remain a petite zero, wanted to excel while recognizing how off-the-mark our values of judgment are, or wondered just how much her body could be worth, reading "Grotesque" is just as powerful an experience as reading "Out" was
  