A high school student, unhappy with life, bludgeons his mother to death with a baseball bat. He is calm and appears removed, almost abstracted from the events. He leaves the scene and disappears into the prefectures surrounding Tokyo. The boy's nickname is Worm. He is not the hero of this book.
The third of Natsuo Kirino's novels (after "Out" and "Grotesque") to be translated into English, "Real World" borrows themes and motifs from its predecessors — the dynamics of a female group and the angst of teenage lives — and applies a tight plot dealing in identity, matricide and friendship. Not as disturbing as "Out" and better realized than "Grotesque," "Real World" is an almost news-as-novel take on Japanese crime writing — if it is crime writing.
Four teenage girls — Toshi, Yuzan, Terauchi and Kirarin slog their way through summer school and teenage depression. The weather is hot. The plot is feverish. The girls communicate mostly through e-mail and text messages, by calls from their cell phones and, ultimately, through a letter that is a suicide note. Here Kirino demonstrates the isolation of everyday lives — the very connectedness of new media results in disassociation.