Grotesque

It concerns the relationship between three girls, how they grow up, the pressures they are subject to, and how they turn out. They are all three more or less desperate and unpleasant, in different ways. They all three turn in the end to prostitution, two of them being murdered.

It is not so much a crime novel, though it is positioned and marketed as that, as a very dark view of the role of women in relation to men and to men's sexual desire. All the men in the book treat the women purely as objects of sexual gratification. The men are seen entirely from outside, they are strange driven creatures, with little or no humanity. The women, from girlhood onwards, are defined by their response to desire and by their power to evoke it. Which fades with the years, of course. The view of men is not simply of Japanese men in Japanese society - the main protagonists in the early part of the book are European, and this account of men as aliens characterises them whether in Europe or in Japan. Japanese society is seen also from the point of view of the women - its oppressive, arbitrary, and places them in a powerless and importunate position. They don't seem to form friendships or relations of affection, they are in continual relations of competition and dislike for each other. The men in the workplace are not simply sexually driven in this incomprehensible way, but are also totally powerful authority figures. One of the girls characterises herself as a nymphomaniac, is possessed by desire too and gratifies with anyone on any occasion. All the characters are unpleasant and unfeeling - there is a sort of universal casual cruelty about all interactions, a complete lack of any human feeling or affection. It is very consistent with the prevailing tone that there are suicides and murders, and that the characters react to these with a complete lack either of shock or feeling. It is as if these are simply the expression of what is going on every day at a less vi