Natsuo Kirino

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Natsuo Kirino ( Japanese 桐 野 夏 生 Kirino Natsuo ; * October 7, 1951 in Kanazawa , Ishikawa Prefecture as Mariko Hashioka ( 橋 岡 ま り 子 , Hashioka Mariko )) is a Japanese writer .

Life

After studying law at Seikei University , she took on various positions in the 1970s and had negative experiences as a woman in the workplace. She married at 24 and her daughter was born at 30. She began her writing career by attending a scenario writer school . From the mid- 1980s she published as Kirino Natsuo (since 1989 also under the pseudonym Noemi Nobara ( 野 原 野 枝 実 , Nobara Noemi )), initially youth books and romance novels (1984, Sanrio Romance Prize for Ai no yukue ), then she switched to hardboiled genre . In 1993 Kirino received the Edogawa Rampo Prize for crime literature for Kao ni furikakaru ame . The author had her literary breakthrough in 1997 with the novel OUT (Eng. The Embrace of Death ), for which she received the Mystery Writers of Japan Award . In 1999 she was awarded the Naoki Prize for Yawarakana hoho , and in 2004 she was nominated for the American Edgar Allan Poe Award with OUT - in translation . Her award-winning works include Gurotesuku (2003, Grotesk , Izumi-Kyōka-Prize), Zangyakuki (2004, German Notes of Cruelty , Shibata-Renzaburō-Prize) and Tamamoe! (2005, Glow, Soul, Burn! Fujin-kōron Literature Prize ). In 2004 I'm sorry, mama ( devil's child ) was released. Current works are the novels Metabola (May 2007), Joshin-ki (2008), Tōkyō-jima (2008, German The island of Tokyo ) and IN (2009).

Literary work

Kirino is a representative of a Japanese literature that is repositioning itself beyond the Japan- related and male-dominated old establishment of the 1960s to 1980s and beyond the category of Japanese women's literature ( joryū bungaku ) with a view to international events.

The author, whose works are often referred to as “problematic” ( mondai-saku ), is currently proving to be a pioneer and trendsetter on the contemporary literary scene. If Murano Miro is the first female private investigator in contemporary Japanese literature, in OUT (1997) , Kirino elevates the average Japanese housewife to the position of heroine in the text Kao ni furikakaru ame (1993), which was awarded the Edogawa Ranpo Prize . With OUT, Kirino recurs on the scheme of the so-called "social school" ( shakai-ha ) of the Japanese crime novel, according to which social grievances are the focus of the descriptions. Also in Kirino various newspaper reports from the "sad" 1990, the "lost decade" (be lost decade / Ushinawareta jūnen ) Japan implemented, a phase represented by the economic stagnation and consequent social dislocation after the decline of the economy highs "Bubble" in is. The issues of the post-bubble era are loneliness, isolation in the middle-class nuclear family, disoriented young people, burned-out employees, Japanese narrowness and collective pressure, consumerism and over-indebtedness. OUT creates four exemplary CVs for Japanese women. The character of the Yayoi represents the catalyst of the plot. In anger she kills her faithless husband Kenji, who squanders the family's savings while gambling in the entertainment district of Shinjuku. The pretty housewife and mother of two young sons reveals her problem to Masako, her comrade from the food factory, where women have to struggle for low wages. This spontaneously promises to help with the removal of the corpse. The widow Yoshië, who owes Masako money, also has to help with the dismemberment of the disgraceful body, which was carved with her own trouser belt, as does Kuniko, another colleague from the lunch box assembly line. Kenji's individual parts are packed in bags, which are then deposited in various garbage dumps. What began as a spontaneous action born out of necessity ends in turn in assembly line work. Because a little crook from the credit business, from which Kuniko borrows money, gets behind the action, Masako and Yoshië see themselves forced to operate the corpse disposal professionally. While they go about their nightly work in the factory, the community of convenience works in Masako's bathroom during the day.

With I'm sorry, mama , Kirino Natsuo is continuing her uncompromising line of “Bubblonia-Bashing”, that is, she continues to happily and happily dismantle a Japan (“Bubblonia”) that committed itself to materialism and its residents after the Second World War is an inhospitable land, a cold mother. While Kirino has a proven vicious approach to contemporary Japanese society, she also writes the exciting story of a notorious murderer. The protagonist of the book, the orphan Matsushima Aiko, represents the decline of the island kingdom. The text impressively comments on her career from an unloved child to an instinctive, unscrupulous 40-year-old survival artist in a hostile environment. The disregard and aggression that the young Aiko experiences is soon articulated in murderous attacks. In the course of her life, Aiko moves from scene to scene, from milieu to milieu, leaving behind a number of corpses, in order to finally learn the secret of her origin. By alluding to various texts and contexts of contemporary Japanese and international literature and culture, as well as to film material, she brings her leitmotif of the criminal, which was already successfully presented in OUT, to a spectacularly dark end.

With the dark, road movie-like novel Metabola (2007), the author continues her theme of Japan (= Bubblonia) bashing and, last but not least, counteracts the official slogan "Cool Japan" in a lasting and impressive way: In Kirino's version, Japan is anything but " cool ”, but a broken nation under the sign of turbo-capitalism, populated by pitiful, doomed people. Kirino's “Freeter Epic” “Metabola” offers a suicide ( jibun koroshi ) variant of the popular happiness guides and self-discovery guides of the Japanese literature market. Metabola can be read as one of the author's darkly colored “advice” ( ikikata no hon ) on the total exit from Japanese society. The text documents the path of two young people, Ginji / Yūta from Tokyo and Akimitsu from Miyako, who meet on the journey, become friends and confide in each other when they meet again. The twenty-six-year-old Ginji lost his memory through a traumatic experience, the mysterious background of which only revealed itself late. While Ginji gradually recovers the memory of his past, the reader can follow Ginji and Akimitsu's path "downwards". Through different situations and milieus of a precarious Japan, the two reach their respective end stations, from which one can assume that the afterlife is waiting behind them. One possible reading of the novel would be that the text passes on the last thoughts of Ginji, whose life is being reviewed in his mind's eye - before he dies together with three companions who agreed to commit suicide ( intānetto jisatsu ) on the Internet .

Kirino Natsuo's novel IN (2009) is about writers and their dark business of writing. IN addresses murder with a pen, a devastating artistic battle between the sexes.

Kirino's texts occupy a special place in contemporary Japanese literature in terms of their originality and exquisite anarchic impetus. The Japanese criticism, especially from the male side, is sometimes downright angry about Kirino's new interpretations of well-known genres such as the hardboiled novel. The award of Kao ni furikakaru ame with the Edogawa Rampo Prize for Crime Literature triggers outrage on the part of a critic who accuses Kirino of having missed the genre. The award of the Naoki Prize for Yawarakana hoho provokes the contradiction of an anonymous person with the code name “beard”. He assumes Kirino to remain on the level of a second-rate writer ( niryū sakka ), who would probably never manage to belong to the leading school ( honryū ) due to her past as a writer of junior novels or lady comics . According to the “beard”, one should therefore not give her praise for her achievements, which Kirino could be proud of. Kirino emphatically rejects the mocking and arrogant criticism that was fired very one-sidedly from a male point of view. She has been known since then as Kenka • Kirino ("Quarrelsome Kirino").

Kirino's turn to the so-called lower-class milieu, her preferences for the darker side of society, cannot be interpreted as the announced return of a “proletarian literature” in the conventional sense. Rather, an attitude manifests itself in Kirino's texts that could be dubbed “yellow trash” parallel to the “white trash” art movement. Kirino's parodistic, at times nasty “yellow trash” with its various taboo subjects and its subversive potential not least attacks the conservative literary world of Japan.

Works (selection)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bungei Bessatsu J-Bungaku 1998: 30
personal data
SURNAME Kirino, Natsuo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 桐 野 夏 生 (Japanese); 橋 岡 ま り 子 (Japanese, real name); Hashioka Mariko (real name); 野 原 野 枝 実 (Japanese, pseudonym); Nobara Noemi (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Kanazawa , Ishikawa Prefecture