I just finished reading Grotesque by Japanese author Natsuo Kirino. It’s an interesting book, ambitious at more than 500 pages, one of those novels that seems to be building to something and then backs away, as if the author wrote herself into a corner and wasn’t sure quite where to go. Nevertheless, it’s definitely a thought-provoking and often troubling read.

Grotesque begins with an unnamed narrator, a 39-year-old woman with a senile grandfather and a part-time government job, discussing the murder of her sister, Yuriko. She tells us that Yuriko possessed a beauty so absolute that it was terrifying, monstrous. She herself, we quickly realize, is even more monstrous in the malice she feels toward her sister (and everyone else), in the twisted and grotesque grudges she bears.

As the book opens, a Chinese immigrant, Zhang, is about to be tried for the murder of Yuriko and another woman, Kazue Sato. Both were prostitutes. Both, along with the narrator, had attended the highly competitive Q High School for Young Women two decades earlier. From there, the three women’s life stories (as well as Zhang’s) unfold.

Yuriko, physically perfect, was “born to be a whore.” Her sister, a year older and plain or even unattractive, is obsessed with escaping from and avenging herself on her sister. Kazue, earnest and clueless, confides in Yuriko’s sister without realizing that Yuriko’s sister plots to destroy her. They navigate the complex, brutal world of high school with varying degrees of success (although the nature of success itself is something on which they differ). Kazue, encouraged by Yuriko’s sister, succumbs to an eating disorder, turning herself physically grotesque in a misguided attempt to become beautiful. The sister wounds everyone around her and seals herself off, a cold, conniving, malicious loner. Yuriko embraces her destiny as a whore, slowly descending from rarefied circles to the streets as she loses her youth and beauty.  As she tells Kazue, “I hate men, but I love sex.”

Into the two prostitutes’ world comes Zhang, a Chinese immigrant with an incestuous fixation on his dead sister, also a whore. Yuriko prophetically tells Kazue that the two women are monsters, and when they find a man who loves monsters, he’ll kill them. Indeed, Zhang strangles her. More than a year later, the freakishly skinny, degraded Kazue also is found dead, and Zhang is arrested and tried for both murders. He admits to killing Yuriko but denies ever meeting Kazue.

Interspersed throughout this plot are meditations on the nature of beauty, how it imprisons people and determines fates, how it makes monsters, how fine the line is between beauty and monstrosity, how people like Kazue make themselves grotesque in pursuit of distorted ideas of beauty. And the plight of women in contemporary Japanese society also plays a central role. These characters, products of an exclusive and academically rigorous school system, find themselves ill-equipped to cope with life, frustrated by glass ceilings and losing their places to younger women, alienated from coworkers, and trapped in hateful, degrading encounters with men.

While the book seems to lose focus and force toward the end, it’s a provocative and disturbing read, a bleak commentary on interactions between girls, women, and the male and female genders. It indicts societal standards of beauty, acceptance, and success and examines the lies we tell ourselves, the lies we tell others, and the lies we believe so much that they obscure the truth.