We Eat Our Own by Kea Wilson

I just finished reading Kea Wilson's debut novel We Eat Our Own. My thoughts? Hmm... let's go over what transpired from the beginning. I started reading the book and was sucked in from the very first page. The narrative was not something I was familiar with, and that alone was enough to spark my curiosity. Needless to say, Kea Wilson has a very weird way of writing... weird not in a bad way, quite the opposite actually. She has a unique style with her writing and her prose, which I found refreshing. And yet, on GoodReads, I gave a rating of 3-stars. Why? Because of the following:

Around three quarters into the book, I started to wonder when we will get to the climax. There was going to be a climax, that I was sure of. So I kept waiting. And Reading. I thought I knew exactly what the climax was going to be, but I didn't know how it was going to play out (more on this reference later in this review), so I was starting to get impatient. And then, when there was about 20 pages or so left in the book, something happened! And it was NOT the climax I was expecting...

The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino

After reading Out and Real World, it is safe to say that Natsuo Kirino is currently one of my favorite authors of feminist noir fiction. She is not afraid to show the dirty and ugly sides of the female of the species, nor the weaker sides. A lot of the times I feel like real issues get overlooked, sometimes intentionally, in the name of feminism. We want to show that women do not have to be weak and live under the shadows of men. True, we do not. But it doesn’t help to sugarcoat things and completely disregard the fact that we are in fact, very different from the male of the species, both physically and emotionally. In my opinion, disregarding the unpleasantries only adds to the problem, not the other way round.

Natsuo Kirino’s protagonists, all women in the three books that I have read so far, are strong. Very much so. But they have weaknesses like real women do. They have limitations as to how much they can do or how far they can go within the socio-economic boundaries that are, sometimes unfairly, set upon us by the society that we live in. Natsuo Kirino is from Japan, so her work of course reflects the Japanese society and issues that are more pertinent to that culture than, say, the western one that we live in. But even so, as women, I think a lot of us can relate to certain characteristics that Ms. Kirino portrays in her characters.

Real World by Natsuo Kirino

A week ago I finished reading Out by Natsuo Kirino, my first book by the author. As soon as I finished, I checked out the only other Natsuo Kirino book available in my library — Real World (translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel). Somehow, Real World turned out to outlive my expectations, and as crazy as it sounds, proved to be even better than Out! One uncanny similarity in these two books is that, they are both focused on a group of four girls. Well, in Out, they were more women than girls, considering the characters were in their 30s, 40s and 50s. In Real World, the girls are high school seniors. The story and the plot, as well as the characters are significantly different however. Somehow, even though the four girls in Real World are much younger, I felt like their characters had more depth than the characters in Out. I do not do star reviews anymore, however, if I had to, I’d give Out a 4.7 out of 5, and Real World… can I give it a 7.5 out of 5? Well, that’s just how much I liked this book.

Out by Natsuo Kirino

I am smitten with Japanese literature in translation. I mean, why else would I spend hours every week just admiring the stacks of Japanese novels in the library? I have also found some Goodreads reviewers who happen to read a ton of Japanese novels and whose reviews I have come to trust. And so, as I’m sure you can imagine, thanks to them, my TBR pile has been soaring lately, and the bulk of it happens to be works of Japanese authors.

Anyhow, setting aside my obsession for the time being, let’s now talk about the book I finished reading last week-ish. Out by Natsuo Kirino, translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder, is the latest addition to my favorite crime/thriller, contemporary fictions. I love a bad-ass, not so innocent, female protagonist, and Masako Katori is just that. She is smart, she appears to be just a normal, average, flawed being, unhappily married with a troubled, teenage boy at home, works a mindless job, and even at the age of 43, she has yet to fully figure herself out. Despite the choices she made and the things she’d done, I couldn’t help liking her. She has a strange charm about her, and Natsuo Kirino did a wonderful job of bringing out her charm. It’s like, I could totally see why everyone around her either depended on her or trusted her, or simple fell in love with her.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

The Man Booker Prize 2016 longlist was announced almost a month ago, and I finally managed to read ONE book out of the entire list. The reason I chose Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh is because, one of my favorite reviewers — Clare of A Little Blog of Books — happened to describe Eileen as one of the creepiest books she had read this year. I love creepy, so I figured I’d start the list with this book.

Eileen is about a girl and her grand escape from her hometown where she was born and raised and spent most of her youth, being unhappy and neglected by her parents, always thinking less of herself, concocting up vivid imaginary situations that would make her feel important. She grew up in a dysfunctional family, and as almost always with the kids of such families, Eileen grew up a little off. Different from her peers in many ways that you wouldn’t know just by looking. The first person to see that she was a bit “different” just happened to be this eccentric young woman, who has issues of her own. May be it is because of that very reason, that Rebecca, the new (I already forgot what her post had been at the juvenile detention center that Eileen worked at, but if memory serves, she had been some sort of…) educational guidance counselor to the young prisoners, sought to take Eileen into her confidence. Eileen, on the other hand, was so distracted and, in search of a more appropriate word, enamored by her, who is the complete opposite of Eileen that she was ready to do anything to feel important, find a friend, akin to a lover almost, in Rebecca.

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami

As I read this book, moving from one page to the next, I could almost see the events unfold, as if I were at a cinema. All good books are like that in the sense that we can visualize the scenes and characters and the interactions; In the Miso Soup does it on a whole another level. I have never been to Tokyo, or Japan as a matter of fact, but somehow, it was as if I were transported there while I was reading. It was as if, I was... I myself was part of the Miso Soup.

Kenji and his gaijin are not an unlikely duo in the streets of Tokyo's red light district, Kabukicho; at least not at first glance. Kenji has worked as a guide to these gaijins (foreigners) for a couple of years already, helping them navigate through the maze-like alleyways of this dingy neighborhood. What the onlookers do not know is that Kenji is walking on eggshells here. He is watching his back, calculating his every move, because one wrong move from his part will get him killed by the strange looking gaijin walking right next to him. That's right, he is a guide to a serial killer and there is nothing he can do to change it, or get out of this mess, except that he finishes doing what he is supposed to do -- be a guide -- and make sure that whatever he does, he lives to see another day.

This was my first book by Ryu Murakami. My introduction to the author's work was a couple of years ago, through a movie called Audition, which was an adaptation of Ryu Murakami's book by the same name. I loved Audition. It was a psychological, creepy thriller... really weird, and scary... just the way I like them. But it was still a movie, and I had not thought of reading the book, or any other book by this author. Few weeks ago as I was digging through Haruki Murakami books at the library, I found Ryu Murakami quite by accident, and this was the first book I came across. From what I have read by some other reviewers on Goodreads, it seems as though this was one of Ryu Murakami's lesser graphic stories. None the less, the one graphic scene that is in this book left me... wanting more. I have this urge to run to the library right now and find more books by this author.