If this sounds suspenseful, for the most part it's not. At least two more characters are dead by the novel's end. Once they find out he's not kidding, they're curious and impressed, and they assist him in his evasion of the police, becoming accomplices who must in turn evade the police themselves. He calls Toshi's friends from her cell phone, and they chat and flirt with him he brags about killing his mother, which they find funny. He rides deep into the Tokyo suburbs, taking refuge from the blazing heat in air-conditioned convenience stores, reading manga on newsstands and bathing in public fountains. While she's in class, Worm steals her bike and cell phone, which has accidentally fallen into the bike's basket. They exchange few words - they are not friends - and Toshi rides off on her bike. On her way to cram school (which prepares students for university entrance exams), she runs into a cheerful Worm on the street. The first chapter is narrated by his neighbor, Toshi, who hears the sound of breaking glass from next door. This time, it's a matricide: an awkward, solitary high school student, nicknamed Worm (he is very skinny), wakes up late on a summer morning and beats his mother to death with a baseball bat.

The book sacrifices the pleasures of a gripping plot and rich social descriptions, leaving promising but incomplete elements of both.

'Real World,' her third and most recent book to be translated into English, presents a murderer and his accomplices who are as confused by their own motives as their pursuers. The second book, 'Grotesque,' lacked 'Out's' suspenseful, grisly cool, but made up for it in its rich depiction of Tokyo schoolgirls and immigrant life in Japan. They are the pivot upon which her three novels that have been translated into English (she's written 16 total) turn, but the investigating detectives hardly appear, and they usually fail to solve the crime.Ī queasy inexorability hung over 'Out,' her first book translated into English, as the characters made bad decision after bad decision until the dramatic and brutal ending.

Real world kirino