GROTESQUE
by Natsuo Kirino
The Harvill Press ₤17.99, 480 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤14.39

Grotesque is a novel you really want to like. Its author, Natsuo Kirino, a Japanese female crime writer of probing intellect, takes on subjects that clearly ought to be tackled. In a supposedly classless society, she writes about class. In a man’s world, she writes about women from a woman’s perspective. And in the most ostensibly peaceable of societies, she plunges into the violence and hatred boiling beneath the surface.

In the latest of 16 books - she turns out novels faster than Grotesque’s prostitutes turn tricks - one of Japan’s most admired fiction writers tells the story of two murdered women and the Chinese immigrant accused of killing them.

These are the sort of dark stories for which Kirino, who started out as a romance writer, has become known. A previous (better) book, Out, related the tale of four working-class women turned body-slicers, whose bathroom dismemberment sessions punctuate their night shifts in a grimy boxed-lunch factory.

The heart of Grotesque’s violence is found not in the neon-lit world where the women meet their grisly end. Instead, it wells from the Q High School for Young Women (feeder school for the elite Q University) where our protagonists are immersed in ruthless competition. Victory is determined by breeding, intellect and, above all, beauty. It is a thoroughly unpleasant portrait of a society obsessed with hierarchy.

The story is told, initially, by the older sister of Yuriko, one of the two murder victims. Yuriko is so terrifyingly beautiful, says the narrator, she is monstrous to behold. Our narrator’s envy and hatred make her monstrous to read.

Subsequent sections of the novel - pieced together like a scrapbook - are related through the victims’ diaries and the “confession” of the accused.

At times, the characters’ stories overlap in uncanny detail. Sometimes they differ wildly. Much of the discrepancy results from self-delusion: the characters harbour fantasies about their own appearance, talents and psychology. What emerges is less a coherent narrative and more a gruesome dismemberment of Japanese society (see Out).

The problem is that it’s not easy to care. With the possible exception of Zhang, the immigrant who flees a Chinese cave for a better life in impossibly rich Japan, none of the characters is portrayed with a shred of empathy. All are relentlessly horrible. At least the book’s title is not misleading.

Even Zhang is revealed (probably) as an out-and-out liar. According to other accounts, he has been on a killing spree from Sichuan to Tokyo and all points in between. In a typically heart-warming line, Zhang says (or is said to have said) of his decision to force his sister into prostitution: “I didn’t do it because I wanted to sleep with my sister. I did it because I wanted to sleep with my prostitute sister. There’s nothing in this world that’s off limits.” This, remember, is the sympathetic character.

The other fragrant personages can’t open their mouths without uttering things such as: “When I saw Kazue I felt like a god, manipulating that dunce like a puppet on a string.” I scrawled “charming” in the margins so often I stopped finding it funny.

But at least the characters are useful, indulging the author by spelling out the book’s themes.

Discussing his descent into male prostitution, Zhang says: “The pink T-shirt I had left behind symbolised everything that had happened to me. It was the innocence that had once belonged to Mei-jun and myself. I had forgotten it in Lou-zhen’s room. And I would live without ever getting it back.” (Note to self: hold on to pink T-shirt for dear life.)

Another character, also speaking in capital letters, says: “Is it really just a silly story? If anything, it’s terrifying. That’s because it represents precisely the value system that holds sway over Japan today.”

Grotesque is not without interest. But rather like Kirino’s characters, the reader is in constant danger of being bludgeoned to death.