1) Grotesque. Natsuo Kirino.
A tale of two prostitutes murdered in Japan. While this book is not scary, it is downright creepy. The murder itself is the least creepy element in the entire book. It's not even the whole series of events leading to the murder. Rather, it's the darkness in the hearts of all the people in this book that raised the hairs of me.
The book's main narrator is related to both prostitutes: the first one is her sister, the second one her classmate. The sister is immensely beautiful, almost too beautiful, such that her beauty is hard to understand, hard to swallow... hard to accept that such a thing exists. The kind of beauty that does not beckon, but arrests those who behold it. She knows of her beauty and she wields its power to weaken those less resolute than her. She becomes a prostitute not because she needs to be--no sob-story related to poverty and absence of opportunity here--but because she wants to. The narrator already calls her sister a monster and she does not even know half of it.
The classmate is not beautiful, not beckoning, and not arresting. But she desperately wants to be. And she tries hard, regardless of the impossibility of it all. The narrator observes the classmate with a condescending eye and resolves to feed her own contempt with the failed attempts of the harried classmate. She prods her to reach impossible heights, and the dimwit obeys, first believing the lies told to her and then later on telling the same lies to herself. She carries on with her life blind to the reality of what she is and what she is not, in the process weakening herself and starving herself of freedom that the recognition of truth provides until in the end she becomes emaciated both body and soul. She mindlessly grins like a fool--seeing herself any which way but the way the rest of the world sees her. Like an idiot, she smiles when there is nothing to smile about.
The narrator is at the center of everything and yet she is nowhere to be found. She believes herself a passive observer of the pathetic lives around her. She believes herself to be on higher ground--better than the others, secure, composed, whole. Little does she know her existence contributes as much to the montrosities that are the lives of her sister and classmate as their lives contribute to hers. Little does she know, she has become as grotesque as the two others. And quite possibly, depending on how you look at it, the most grotesque of them all.
Those who long for closure at the end of books need not bother with this one. There is no light at then end of the tunnel here. Redemption on earth is portrayed as a lost cause. Not a shred of love in this book--whether romantic, sisterly, brotherly, fatherly, grandfatherly, friendly. There is nothing but isolation, hate, and need, rendering the mix of the first two potions a deadly combination.
One might say: What's the big deal about another book about dysfunctional people? After quentin tarantino and borat, what is hate but another buzzword? Here is what is: reading about the potential for evil and nodding in agreement. O hindi ba scary? The thoughts and feelings of the people here are some of the darkest, sickest, loveless-est I have ever read. And reading through them, I saw why they think and feel such--worse, I understood how come. Envy, jealousy, hate, disgust--these are basic feelings latent in everyone. Latent, but real and alive in all. Reading the book, one realizes that depravity -- the wickedness that is the human condition -- has an absolute existence. Creepier still, one need only take one look at someone else lost in depravity in order to find it alive and well in one's self.
Next: Perfume by Patrick Suskind. Bottling pure evil.
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