Real World
Natsuo Kirino
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
<p>Astunning new work of feminist noir, the genre Natsuo Kirino has defined and made her own in Out and Grotesque. In a crowded Tokyo suburb, four teenage girls wade indifferently through a hot, smoggy summer. When one of them, Toshi, discovers that her next-door neighbor has been brutally murdered, the girls suspect the neighbor’s son. And when he flees, taking Toshi’s bike and cell phone with him, the four girls get caught up in a tempest of dangers that rise from within as well as from the world around them. Psychologically intricate, Real World is a searing, eye-opening portrait of teenage life in Japan unlike any we have seen before.</p>