I really wanted to like Grotesque as much as I liked Kirino's Out. With the two novels I've read by Kirino, "like" is a relative term. It's hard to say that one enjoys the horror and degradation that are features of her work, but she certainly knows how to tell a story in a way that is utterly compelling.

Grotesque follows the interwoven lives of four people: two women who are half-Japanese/half-Swiss, their high-school classmate and a Chinese national accused of murdering one of the sisters and the classmate. Kirino's portrait of the Japanese underworld is, if anything, more horrific than it was in Out, but it loses its impact along the way because the reader is repeatedly hammered with it. While other authors have certainly successfully utilized a similar storytelling device as Kirino does here (there are four narratives), the result feels sloppy and rushed, as if Kirino's publisher wanted to capitalize on the success of the English-language translation of Out, and the narrators' voices tend not to ring true.

An interesting story, to be sure, but it lacks the style that made Out such an outstanding novel.