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Many readers who express an interest in Japanese literature are already familiar with Natsuo Kirino’s fascinating work. Her recent novel, Real World, reads like a social study carefully disguised as crime fiction. The crime itself, a murder, slowly makes its way out of the picture, revealing other dangers, and rushing the story forward like a Tokyo bullet train.

The main characters are high school students with few bonds to each other and whose aspirations are as mundane as to simply live a peaceful life. Unfortunately, that is not meant to happen, and their worlds are doomed to be invaded by all the threats of the real world imaginable: school girl-obsessed creeps, fortune tellers, marketers, shallow pop-culture, alienated parents, personal disasters they have no idea how to cope with, smothering relatives and peers forcing them to study, study, study until you “spit up blood”, study “like you are going to die.”

Their world, the real world of ordinary teenagers, doesn’t have anything to do with the images imposed on them by society. The girls just want to be honest, simple school kids – not crazed fashion victims or misunderstood and harassed market research targets. The boys want to live up to realistic expectations but are not given an opportunity to be average, regular kids who do not stand out socially or academically. The teens are exasperated, confused and annoyed with their own lives not because they cannot get the things they want, but because they can barely make sense of what is weighing and smothering them so much and how to get rid of it.

With vivid imagery and an extremely realistic first-person narrative, Real Life is powerful without the intention to shock. The whole perspective on Japanese society is flipped upside down – “good” and “bad” constantly switch places, and it is up to the reader to judge what is happening and take sides. This novel, so charged with conflict it is about to burst, will not leave you uninvolved.

Read more: Author Crush, Book Reviews, Fiction, Japan, Tokyo, World Culture


Nastia was born in Russia, and probably that's the reason why she is so inexplicably attracted to the coldest parts of the world, such as Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Alaska and Canada. The more it snows out there - the better. Although would she be even thinking about all that cold if she hadn't first enjoyed Turkey, Bulgaria and Ukraine?

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