Grotesque

Kirino Natsuo’s Out left no doubt whatsoever about her talent for portraying monsters and drawing us into their world. It created a pervading sense of unease, coming not only out of its characters’ actions but their circumstances. I wasn’t sure how she’d be able to top Out’s mixture of squalor and brutality. I was still willing to see what she could do.

Grotesque cleared that question right up.

Kirino takes her skills and uses them to portray life in a competitive high-school. Teenage girls and boys, but still Kirino characters, their monstrosity unchecked by any of the restraints adults acquire. Unlike the late workers in Out, the girls of Grotesque don’t need to cast off social restraints before their nature can come through. They don’t have any. They are raw bundles of id fighting for grades and clawing each other for scraps of social status.

And still, most of their horrible behavior comes from an unrestrained need for acceptance.

They are all adrift. Grotesque’s adults failed the children, all in their own way. Parents left them to stumble around in the world, figure out things on their own. Guardians misused their power. The children developed an all-consuming need for structure and fitting in. The over-competitive high-school was the only institution present that could offer it.

As they go into the school, the girls are overly concerned with what everyone thinks of them. They want approval. They long for it and resent those who get it easily. But there’s a limited amount of attention going around, and those for whom social skills come naturally are already hogging it.

Popularity pays off in compound interest.

Grades are alluring because they made it easy to see you stack up. The school cliques provide a way to belong — if you can get in. Those who don’t, and who didn’t have clear guidance at home, might as well have grown alone and feral in the woods.

The school isn’t the only inhospitable environment she takes us to. Kirino sometimes switches perspectives to an equally competitive situation: being a female employee of a top firm.

Already past 40, they are now in a position where they feel their future has been decided for them. Their best years are behind them. They are no longer the bundles of potential they were when they joined, or even back in the school they hated. They have been put in the little box that their peers think approximates their shape the most and left there to fade.

None of the environments we see approve of re-invention. Once they catalog you, those around you will fight any attempt you make to switch ledger columns.

Self-destruction is a path to freedom, a tool against those who would feel embarrassed by our choices. Refusing to belong is an act of rebellion.

Once they get used to not belonging, they treat everything as a slight. They convince themselves that desire makes them weak. They see good-natured people with suspicion, question their motives. They block empathy, as it provides a way for people to hack their perception. They sharpen their edges, instead of making themselves more welcoming.

When they don’t get the acceptance they expect, they refuse accepting anyone themselves.

All but one of Grotesque’s girls miss a fundamental point as they try to be popular. As they try to be someone else’s idea of perfection, they don’t realize that it’s the specific void in ourselves that makes us unique. We just need to learn how to live with it, instead of stuffing it with crud in a hasty attempt to pass for whole.

Kirino plays with my weaknesses. She knows which tendons to pluck for strings.

Then again, it’s a book about projecting. Projecting how you want to be perceived. Expecting others to be what they project out. Projecting pre-conceived notions into someone else’s behavior.

I might be doing a bit of projecting myself.

The book has multiple perspectives, every narrator as unreliable as the last. One of them even admits to “slightly correcting” the first-person account another one wrote. Filled with clashing details and conflicting stories, Grotesque is the kind of book that would lend itself to a second reading.

I just would rather not.