Real World by Natsuo Kirino Search Amazon for other books by or about Natsuo Kirino. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

According to the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, the real is located outside of the symbolic and opposed to the imaginary. It cannot be achieved through the imaginary (or, consequently, imagination) and it lacks the structure of the symbolic, which is defined by opposition and binary constructs. People seek the real but it is something that can never be obtained and, therefore, it is a source of constant anxiety and stress to people. This is, so to speak, the key to Natsuo Kirino's short novel Real World, which deals with the brief lives and loves of five Japanese teenagers, each of whom is in some sense or another searching for the "real." The principal characters, four young women and one young man, find themselves dissatisfied with their lives and with the options available to them to try to become what is authentic or, that is, real. The women can search for truth through explorations of their sexuality or their physical appearance, behaviour and language, which can be set against the norms demanded by bourgeois, aspirational Tokyo society. Yet, as Lacan observes, the real cannot be achieved by the adoption of these symbolic opposites, which thus become little more than posturing and, for the individuals concerned, a source of the anxiety predicted.

The boy, for he remains a boy, goes further in the physical world in the search for the authentic in that he murders his mother, at the beginning of the novel in a manner reminiscent of Raskolnikov's more infamous murder (although he is, of course, no Raskolnikov). He then steals the bicycle and mobile telephone of his next door neighbour Toshi, one of the four young women, each of whom he then calls and establishes different types of relationship as they offer him different forms of help in escaping from justice. Their relationships are far from straightforward as they all immediately conform with Toshi's nickname for him of the Worm and he neither exhibits any interesting characteristics himself nor are any of the women able to find anything or are interested in doing so. Instead, like teenagers all around the world, they perceive the inadequacies of the world and of society to result from the fact that they themselves are different from other people and, to oversimplify to a perhaps unfair extent, nobody understands them. What might appear to be a somewhat mundane tale of angst-ridden teenagers (who would as so many bourgeois teenagers do fail T. S. Eliot's objective correlative test), therefore, becomes a much more interesting (and necessarily limited in size) exploration of Lacan's concepts in modern Japanese society. That Kirino intends this is indicated, to a certain extent, by a single mention of Freud (Lacan is a Freudian) and the title--which might be quite different in Japanese, which is one of the overwhelming majority of languages of which I cannot speak more than a few words.

Natsuo Kirino is an interesting author, largely because of the interesting milieu described and the ways in which Japanese protagonists hope to reconcile themselves with mainstream society despite its many difficulties. Stylistically, it is very difficult to tell whether there is much beyond the functional in the prose involved--the story is told and the interpreter tries to stay out of the way, which is fair enough for a work of this kind. The result is a quite compelling story which is tinged with the inevitable tragedies to come. And the tragic ending does come. The real is not attained.