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Feminine Aspiration, Feminine Malaise:

Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque and the Tōden OL Debates

Tomiko Yoda

The Tōden OL Murder Case

In March 1997, a thirty-­nine-­year-­old woman was found robbed and

strangled in a vacant apartment in the Shibuya Ward of Tokyo. The run-­
down building was located on a backstreet of a bustling urban center, in
a neighborhood known for its concentration of “love hotels” designed for
trysts. In the course of the investigation, a startling revelation about the
victim’s private life came to light. By day, she held a managerial position at
one of the largest corporations in Japan, earning a “six-­figure salary.”1 Yet,
by night, before heading back to the middle-­class home she lived in with
her mother and her younger sister, she regularly engaged in sex work for
an escort agency or as a freelancer on the street near the crime scene.
This crime was dubbed the “Tōden OL Murder Case” by the media,2 and it

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1. Sano Shin’ichi speculates that the victim’s salary as a senior economic researcher was
in the range of 10 million yen. See Sano Shin’ichi, Tōden OL satsujin jiken [Tōden OL mur-
der case] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2000), 65.
2. “Tōden” is short for Tokyo Electric Power Company, of Fukushima nuclear disas-

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became one of the most widely discussed murder cases in contemporary

Japanese history.3
At first, male-­oriented tabloids and weekly magazines were abuzz
over the victim’s double life, evoking a well-­worn pornographic trope: the
specter of a good woman with the hidden face of a whore. However, as a
stream of nonfiction reportage and fictional dramas, novels, and films draw-
ing on the case followed, “Tōden OL” began morphing from the fodder for
erotic titillation into something quite different.4 There were accounts of the
murdered woman’s setbacks in her career, her history of anorexia, and the
meticulous records she kept on her sex-­work clients and the payments she
received from them. Some of her acquaintances described her as serious,
fastidious, and hardworking, but there were also rumors of her eccentric
and unruly behavior, especially during her final years—eating, drinking, and
urinating on the street, having sex in public spaces, napping on the floor at
her corporate office, and sending emails to her sex-­work clients from her
office computer. Both her family and her corporate colleagues were appar-
ently aware of her double life; it is not clear if they tried to intervene.
Sano Shin’ichi, who wrote a densely researched, best-­selling nonfic-
tion book on the case, confesses that the murdered woman remains a deep
mystery to him.5 Yet, a number of female writers, critics, and media profes-
sionals seem to have found her story hitting all too close to home.6 “I am
Tōden OL” became a mantra of sorts, allegedly uttered by women empa-
thizing with her as a feminine subject of distress, rage, and acting out.7 The

ter notoriety. “OL,” or “Office Lady,” refers to female workers in clerical and secretarial
positions.
3. While I do not have the space to elaborate here, the murder case has captivated public
attention, in part due to the prolonged and harrowing process of the arrest and repeated
trials of Govinda Prasad Mainali, a Nepalese restaurant worker charged with the crime.
After fifteen years of imprisonment, Mainali was acquitted in 2012. For many, the Tōden
OL murder case has shed dramatic light on racism as well as sexism plaguing the institu-
tions central to mainstream Japanese society.
4. The list of publications on the case is too long to cite here. There are at least ten non-
fiction books focused on the case and its aftermath, together with five novels, two feature
films, one adult video, two stage plays, and one TV drama series inspired by the case.
5. Sano, Tōden OL satsujin jiken, 441.
6. Gabriella Lukacs offers a fascinating account of a female TV producer who created
a drama series inspired by the murder case, injecting into the show her own sense of
struggle as a female professional in a male-­dominated workplace. See Gabriella Lukacs,
Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), esp. chap. 2.
7. Feminist psychologist Ogura Chikako recounts a late-­night phone call from an unmar-

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Yoda / Japan Dossier / Feminine Aspiration, Feminine Malaise 187

shifting valence of “Tōden OL” suggests that its symbolic force has taken a
life of its own, moving beyond references to the murder case and its victim.
In the remaining pages of this essay, I will examine Tōden OL as a
node in a discourse that began to proliferate in late 1990s Japan, evoking
a peculiar sense of difficulty living and surviving (ikinikusa, ikizurasa) as a
woman in mainstream Japanese society. It has been said that since the col-
lapse of the bubble economy in the 1990s and the accelerated pace of neo-
liberal transformations in Japan, the clearly defined gendered life course
and gendered division of labor (i.e., centered on the middle-­class union
of breadwinning husbands and homemaking wives) have been breaking
down. Moreover, as it has been observed in the Anglo-­American context,
under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, middle-­class femininity has
been associated with expanded freedom and choices, on the one hand,
and the normalization of psychopathological disorder, rage, and self-­
harming behaviors, on the other.8 Tōden OL has attracted much attention
as a spectacular instance of feminine malaise erupting out of volatile and
uneven shifts in the existing sexual contract.
I would like to examine this construction of Tōden OL with and
against Kirino Natsuo’s 2003 fiction best seller, Grotesque, loosely inspired
by the case.9 While Grotesque draws on and contributes to debates over
the murdered woman, it also avoids invoking Tōden OL as a straightfor-
ward figure of feminine suffering that invites easy empathy. In particular,
the novel explores Tōden OL in relation to not only a gendered but also a
classed subject position—an incarnation of values, dispositions, and affec-
tive proclivities of the mainstream that took shape not so much in the post-
bubble 90s but in earlier decades, during the heyday of the so-­called gen-
eral middle-­class society (sōchūryū shakai ) in Japan.

ried female journalist with a demanding career who uttered this very phrase. Ogura Chi-
kako and Ueno Chizuko, Za Feminizumu [The feminism] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2005),
175. Sano Shin’ichi claims that he received an overwhelming number of letters from
female readers of his book expressing strong emotional connection to the victim. Sano
Shin’ichi, Tōden OL Syndrome (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2001), 10.
8. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change
(London: Sage, 2009), esp. chap. 4.
9. Grotesque was a critical and commercial success, winning the prestigious Izumi Kyōka
Prize, and ranked among best-­selling books of the year. It is often regarded as a repre-
sentative work by Kirino, a popular writer who is known for weaving sharp social commen-
taries into her crime novels.

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Debates over Tōden OL

Hayami Yukiko, a freelance journalist and writer, was among the

early commentators who suggested that the key to understanding Tōden
OL lies less with her sex work than with her corporate career. The mur-
dered woman joined Tōden in 1980 as one of the first groups of women
hired into the managerial track by the company. She presumably faced
what many pioneering female professionals in large Japanese companies
experienced: bosses who didn’t know how to treat female managerial-­track
employees; isolation among female workers, the majority of whom were
not on career tracks; and the growing sense that no matter how hard they
worked, women could not win full membership in the corporate culture.
Hayami speculates that Tōden OL’s sex work was not so much an outlet for
a repressed sexuality but compensation for the failed attempt at establish-
ing her identity through her corporate career.10
Hayami sees the murder case as marking the destabilization of gen-
der norms that have informed individual and social life. The image of Japan
(established during the era of high-­speed economic growth) as a nation
of corporate-­warrior fathers, working hard to support saintly homemaking
mothers, chaste daughters, and well-­behaved sons, is no longer compel-
ling, even as a form of collective fiction. In particular, Hayami argues that
the dysfunction of corporate life and middle-­class domesticity as matrices
of gendered fantasm have created a vacuum in which addiction, violence,
and self-­harm have festered.11
Ueno Chizuko, a well-­known feminist critic, has written extensively on
Tōden OL as an emblem of the new dilemma facing Japanese women. “Ever
since the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) was enacted, women
are not considered fulfilled unless they have achieved success as an indi-
vidual together with success as a woman.”12 The Equal Employment Oppor-
tunity Law (Koyō Kikai Kintōhō) was implemented by the Japanese govern-
ment in 1986 and aimed at promoting gender equality in the workplace. It
prompted large corporations to begin offering managerial-­track positions to
women, which were previously reserved for regular male employees.
Ueno suggests that although EEOL promoted career success to

10. Hayami Yukiko, Anata wa mō gensō no onna shika dakenai [Now you can only make
love to a woman in fantasy] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1998), 14.
11. Hayami, Anata wa mō gensō no onna shika dakenai, 34–38; 212–15.
12. Ueno Chizuko, Onna girai: Nippon no misogyny [Women hating: Misogyny in Japan]
(Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 2010), 207–8.

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women, that life goal did not replace the specifically feminine yardstick of
successful maturation (i.e., marriage and motherhood) but was added to it
instead. She characterizes the career success as the value one achieves
actively, and feminine success in marriage and motherhood as the value
one attains passively via male recognition in heterosexual relations. And
she identifies fundamental tension between them. Moreover, she hints at
the asymmetrical status between the two measures of success, referring to
the best-­selling book about single women by Sakai Junko.
In her book, Sakai observes that single women like she, who spent
their young adulthood playing and working hard, are “loser dogs” despite
the appearance of urban glamour and freedom. This is because conven-
tional wisdom still holds that marriage and motherhood are preeminent
indicators of female adulthood. Loser dogs in their thirties face the rude
awakening that their attainment of economic independence, consumer
cultural sophistication, and a robust social network has distracted them
from pursuing marriage in earnest and that these “assets” tend to turn off
potential grooms who are still beholden to the old-­fashioned feminine mys-
tique. Sakai urges Japanese single women to come to terms with their
loser status with a self-­deprecating sense of humor, emulating the global
postfeminist heroines of Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary.13 Yet,
the media reported that the popularity of the term “loser dog” fanned single
women’s anxiety over growing old alone amid postbubble economic and
social uncertainties.
Ueno sees a patriarchal and misogynistic ruse here. In a more per-
missive contemporary society, women are no longer divided into mothers
and whores via a sexual double standard, but they still find themselves
judged according to seemingly conflicting systems of valuation ultimately
controlled by and serving men.14 She traces the tragedy of Tōden OL to her
condition of being torn between two vectors of masculine approval (a cor-
porate managerial logic and a heterosexual economy).
Novelist and essayist Nakamura Usagi also sees Tōden OL as a
figure assailed by contradictory demands that confound the female quest
for stable and affirmative self-­identity in Japan today. But in an argument
reminiscent of The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf, Nakamura emphasizes
how body image (beauty, youth, and erotic magnetism) functions as a con-

13. Sakai Junko, Makeinu no tōboe [The howl of the loser dog] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2003),
89–90.
14. Ueno, Onna girai, 223.

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stant reminder to women that autonomy and social achievements are not
­sufficient guarantors for female self-­worth. She suggests that Tōden OL
elicited in women the fear that, regardless of what they attain in the world,
they can always be undercut by specifically feminine insults—“fat, small-­
breasted, not sexy, and so on.”15 Nakamura speculates that for Tōden OL,
freelance sex work was an act of reprisal against the forces conspiring to
turn her into a passive object of sexuality.16 Feminist sociologist and poet
Minashita Kiryū also sees Tōden OL’s sex work as a reaction against and
an attempt to control the notoriously elusive criteria of feminine allure.
Instead of being subjected to such opaque standards of valuation, she
argues, Tōden OL placed a concrete price tag on herself by selling sexual
services.17

Working Double Shifts

Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque features a character, Kazue, whose pro-

file clearly parallels that of Tōden OL. Kazue’s life as an adult is largely
presented through her diary, expressing yearnings, frustrations, and anger
resonating with those attributed to Tōden OL by the critics I have discussed
so far. Kazue’s diary quite bluntly expresses her two-­pronged desire:

I want to win. I want to win. I want to be number one.

I want people to say, What a great woman, I’m glad I got to know
her.18

Kazue was raised as the prized daughter of her father—himself a

graduate of a top university and an elite salaryman. Her father instilled in
her a devout belief in academic meritocracy and contempt for her home-
making mother (whose diploma was from a second-­tier college). Having
lost her father to illness while attending an elite college, she follows in his
footsteps by working for his former employer, G Construction.

15. Nakamura Usagi, Kowareta onēsan wa sukidesuka [Do you like a broken lady?]
(Tokyo: Field-­Y, 2003), 4–5.
16. Nakamura Usagi, Onna to iu yamai [An illness called woman] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha,
2006), 166.
17. Minashita Kiryū, Buraika suru onnatachi [Women becoming dissolute] (Tokyo:
Yōsensha, 2009), 74.
18. Kirino Natsuo, Grotesque, trans. Rebecca Copeland (New York: Vintage, 2007), 421.
Copeland translates “ii onna” in Japanese as “a great woman,” but the term often means
“attractive woman,” especially in the eyes of men.

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At first, Kazue immerses herself in her work, but the corporate career
she dreamed of begins to sour by the end of her twenties. She craves rec-
ognition from her employer, but she sees that women do not age well in
the corporate world.19 Men in her cohort are steadily moving up the ranks,
while she and other women are pushed aside into lackluster posts or leave
the company for a “safe landing” in marriage. Kazue herself does not have
a matrimonial backup plan. Men do not find her attractive, and, at any rate,
her mother’s life did not inspire her with much confidence in the domestic
bliss of homemaking. So she is stuck in a life not very different from that of
a middle-­aged salary man, commuting between home and work, bringing
back paychecks that her mother depends on (without getting the respect
due a breadwinner).20
This is the point at which she begins moonlighting, first at a host-
ess bar and then at an escort service. Working at night, she discovers
the thrill of becoming an object of men’s sexual interest while at the same
time deriding men, savoring the simple and concrete cash payments she
receives for her labor. The double shifts of day and night jobs supplement
each other, helping Kazue fight back the sense of inadequacies as a pro-
fessional and as a woman. In Kazue’s eyes, the daring acts at night give
her an edge over her colleagues, who are hemmed in by corporate disci-
pline. Meanwhile, she feels superior to even the most popular girls she
works with at night because of her elite corporate job. Like a legendary
corporate warrior, she literally works both day and night, but not in order to
demonstrate her tireless dedication to her job. To offset her company’s fail-
ure to fully utilize her as human capital, she becomes entrepreneurial, ped-
dling herself on the sly.
Yet, as she nears the end of her thirties, she knows her days as a
sex worker are numbered, and sustaining the “work-­work balance” is taking
mental, emotional, and physical tolls on her. She records her roller-­coaster
mood swings and wildly contradictory thoughts in her diary. At times, she
relishes the freedom of nocturnal life, pumped up with devil-­may-­care bra-
vado that she is spitting in the face of her family and her employer. But at
other times, she is overcome by the desperate fear of losing her grip on
things, finding herself turning into a monster. Is Kazue ahead of the game
or not? Moreover, why does she take on such a frenzied way of life in order
to feel like she has the upper hand?

19. Kirino, Grotesque, 443.

20. Kirino, Grotesque, 431–32.

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Looking back at her life, Kazue finds the origin of her predicament
not in her employment at G Construction but in her admission to the pres-
tigious and academically competitive Q High School for Young Women in
the mid-­1970s. Nearly half of Grotesque is devoted to depicting Kazue and
other central female characters at this school. The school is modeled after
Keiō Women’s High School, an exclusive private school that the victim of
the Tōden OL murder attended, though little has been made public about
her life there. While the novel’s depiction of Kazue as an adult draws on the
information publicized about the actual case, Kazue’s life at high school is
where Grotesque utilizes powerful novelistic imagination to comment on
the Tōden OL controversy.
Unlike the corporate culture Kazue enters as an adult, Q High is
not a male-­dominated institution. Rather, it prides itself on promoting the
spirit of independence and self-­respect in its female students. For Kazue,
the adversity of Q High lies elsewhere. On the first day of school, Kazue
and other students new to Q High are mortified to discover that while they
hemmed their skirts to knee level (following the school’s guidelines on
school uniforms), the students moving to the high school from the affiliated
middle school casually defy the rule. These so-­called insiders wear their
skirts shorter, a fashionable but not vulgar mini length. Moreover, they sport
designer haircuts, luxury-­brand shoes, watches, and jewelry. The daugh-
ters of the wealthiest and best-­connected families in Japan, they form an
enclave of superiority and create a wall of icy disinterest between them and
the students who arrive from the “outside.”
The new students at Q High are hardly from underprivileged back-
grounds. Like Kazue, they are mostly daughters of salarymen at large cor-
porations. However, in the class structure of Q High, they are destined to
be second-­class citizens, not only because of their petit bourgeois socio-
economic backgrounds but because they are “uncool,” having devoted their
early adolescence to cramming for exams, compared to the insiders, who
exude relaxed (even decadent) refinement wrought in privilege. At Q High,
comfortably middle-­ class and academically skilled students like Kazue
quickly turn tense and insecure, finding themselves in a new terrain of com-
petition they are not prepared for.

Mass Rivalry in General Middle-­Stream Society

Grotesque’s account of Q High says less about the superprivileged

insiders than about tendencies and assumptions of mainstream Japan

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internalized by Kazue and other girls like her. Between the late 1960s until
the collapse of the bubble economy in the 1990s, Japan was frequently
described as a general middle-­class or “middle-­stream” society (sōchūryū
shakai ), in which a vast majority of the population classified themselves
as being members of the “middle stream” (chūryū) of social stratification.
Shibuya Nozomu argues that more than any objective standard of income,
resources, and status, middle class is defined by an ethos that naturalizes
the built-­in precarity and strains of living in a capitalist society, and that one
can be protected from its negative effects through individual effort, abilities,
and the willingness to enter into competitive relations with others.21
Of particular importance in Shibuya’s discussion of the middle-­class
ethos in Japan is its close association with an intensive competitive pressure
broadly dispersed among the population, not just among the elites competing
for the highest stakes. Shibuya and many others have pointed to the nation’s
educational system as a critical apparatus in staging this mass rivalry. With
schools and individual students ranked across the board according to an
exam-­based system of evaluation, everyone was encouraged to strive (at
least to move up a notch or two) if not to aim for the very top.
The mechanism of academic competition was strongly linked to how
Japanese companies hire and manage their workers. Typically, male regu-
lar employees were hired straight out of school into a cohort that would be
their primary rivals. While some in the cohort might eventually lag behind or
jump ahead, the initial process of selection within the group was relatively
prolonged. In both school and at work, therefore, individuals were plotted
onto gradual and minutely differentiated rankings within cohort groups,
generating a broad middle strata that remained assiduously engaged in
a struggle for upward mobility—neither outright winners nor clear losers.
The stretched-­out field of competition underwrote the mythos of
inclusive and egalitarian middle-­stream Japan, despite structural exclu-
sions and inequities existing in the society. For instance, the mass rivalry
in the corporate workplace was organized under stringent gender segre-
gation, consigning female workers to low-­wage and dead-­end pink-­collar
jobs, to be held for a limited term until they would marry. This exploitation of
female labor was often described as a feminine prerogative—women were
given the chance to “opt out” of the rat race for a placid and comfortable
middle-­class domestic life.

21. Shibuya Nozomu, Midoru kurasu o toinaosu [Rethinking the middle class] (Tokyo:
NHK Shuppan, 2010), 18.

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The notion that women were somehow shielded from the effects of
mass rivalry is egregious in a many ways, not only because gendered exclu-
sion played complex roles in reinforcing workplace competition for regu-
lar male workers,22 but also because, in the domain of consumer culture,
women were intensively mobilized into upstream aspiration and sociality
defined by competitive relations. Since the 1970s, the promotion of a “one-­
rank-­up lifestyle,” epitomized by the acquisition of high-­end products, was a
principal theme in Japanese consumer culture. Women—young women in
particular—were called upon to acquire luxury-­brand goods. The average
secretary may not have been able to afford a closet full of designer-­brand
clothes, but she might splurge on a Louis Vuitton key chain or save up to
buy a Louis Vuitton handbag or two.
Moreover, young women were encouraged to embrace luxury
brands as constituents of their individual identity as well as a means to
access a brand community. Annual collections of popular luxury brands
were minutely cataloged in women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines, so
much so that brand-­savvy young women could quickly date and price items
in possession of each other. Mediating the shared knowledge of calcu-
lable (monetary) value on one hand, and values associated with individual
feelings, imagination, and desire, on the other, brand consumption chan-
neled diverse facets of everyday practices and social interactions into pro-
cesses of mutual monitoring and rivalry. Buying and displaying overpriced
luxury brands in this context had less to do with emulating the lifestyle of
the upper class than with participating in the competitive and aspirational
middle-­stream culture.

Teenage Disaster

An episode of Kazue’s particularly poignant teenage humiliation

aptly occurs over a brand-­name product: navy-­colored Ralph Lauren knee-­
high socks, which are de rigueur of wealthy girls at Q High. One day, a pair
is accidently left on the floor, and a girl who finds it squeals in cruel delight,
revealing that it is adorned by a faux logo sown onto it. Kazue does not dare

22. As I have argued elsewhere, this discriminatory treatment of women helped constitute
the status of regular male workers as the “in group,” a privilege worth preserving through
tireless commitment to work. Tomiko Yoda, “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society,” in
Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present,
ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006),
263.

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step forth to claim her handiwork, but later on, she privately defends her-
self behind her classmates’ backs. Why pay for the stupid logo? Kazue is
blind to the fact that what matters is not simply whether one owns the socks
but how one performs the ownership (as if one hardly notices the premium
price paid for the stupid logo). She carelessly risks exposing herself as a
wannabe in an environment where brand-­name products serve not as the
token of middle-­stream aspiration but as the signifier of excess, which the
wealthy command with ease.
At Q High, Kazue falters even in academic competition. The highest
performers at the school are not hard workers, like Kazue, but the genuinely
gifted, like her classmate Mitsuru, who never fails to rank at the top of their
class. Moreover, Mitsuru, unlike Kazue, knows that converting one’s talent
into concrete advantages at the school requires finesse. Having entered
Q Academy to attend its middle school, Mitsuru is initially bullied by class-
mates who sniff out the working-­class pedigree of her widowed mother. But
she learns to rally the support of insiders by pretending to freely share her
study notes with them, while in fact keeping her real notes only for herself.
In contrast to Kazue, whose sweaty efforts and thirst for recognition are on
clear display, Mitsuru secures her place in the school hierarchy by excelling
without appearing to work too hard or to care about doing well.
Later in the novel, however, we learn that Mitsuru’s hidden compul-
sion to compete comes back to haunt her. Upon graduating from Q High,
she enters the nation’s top medical school. But there, she runs into rivals
with even greater inborn academic gifts than hers and less clearly defined
forms of competition in the professional world. Frustrated, she leaves medi-
cine for a cult group reminiscent of Aum Shinrikyō that promises unending
opportunities to move up the ladder of spiritual development. She ends up
becoming a high-­ranking member of the cult and is sent to prison for par-
ticipating in the group’s terrorist plot.
Kazue’s experience at Q High takes a further downward turn with
the arrival of Yuriko, a beautiful Eurasian transfer student who enters the
grade below hers. Yuriko proves that uncommonly good looks can open
doors to even aristocratic circles, such as being invited to join the school’s
cheerleading squad. Kazue had once applied to join the squad and wasn’t
even allowed to try out (Kazue had complained that this was “unfair,” invit-
ing sneers from other students). Kazue becomes preoccupied with Yuriko,
stalking her, developing a crush on a handsome boy who was seen hang-
ing out with her. This triggers Kazue’s characteristically bumbling efforts—
wearing clownish makeup and starving herself to the point of anorexia. But

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her puppy love ends in a devastating letdown, and Kazue returns to cram-
ming for tests with high-­pitched fervor, sealing her reputation as a school
pariah, mocked from a distance.
Young Yuriko embodies Beauty beyond optimism or striving. Her
presence creates a panic not only in Kazue but in many other girls at the
school, provoking intense insecurities and anxieties over body, sexuality,
and gender identity that adolescent girls are rarely immune to, no mat-
ter how wealthy or otherwise privileged. Yet, Yuriko, too, is embroiled in a
battle to survive in a hostile environment. Having been sexually abused
from an early age, she has learned to embody a doll-­like facade, open-
ing her body freely to others but keeping her thoughts and feelings tightly
locked inside of her. Her precarious upbringing has taught her not to harbor
much ambition or hope, and as an adult, she has drifted aimlessly through
life, letting her beauty erode with age. Years later, Kazue and Yuriko run
into each other as street prostitutes and agree to share their turf, wearing
similar outfits, wigs, and heavy makeup. As aging streetwalkers, the one-
time “stalkee” and the onetime stalker became an eerie double, masquer-
ading as each other. By the time Grotesque opens, both Yuriko and Kazue
are dead, apparently murdered by the same man while plying their trades.

Dubious Narrator

Thus, Grotesque depicts teenage Kazue as a suggestible wannabe

and a frenzied aspirant, falling flat on her face. This may seem like a cruel
caricature, especially for a character drawn from an actual murder case.
But Grotesque seems to anticipate just such an objection. The novel’s por-
trayal of Kazue at Q High is rendered in the first-­person voice. The narra-
tor, who remains anonymous (we never learn her name), is Kazue’s and
Mitsuru’s classmate at Q High and Yuriko’s older sister. Early in the novel,
she announces that she will tell everything she knows about these women,
sharing not only her recollections about them but also letters, diaries
(including Kazue’s journal cited earlier), and other documents that have
come into her possession. But the novel invites readers to doubt whether
anything she says or presents can be trusted.
The narrator entered Q High the same year with Kazue but, unlike
her classmate, she claims to have quickly understood that she will remain a
“nobody” at the elite school. So she promptly chooses to stay on the side-
line and hone her ability to enjoy the suffering of others. Posing as a friend,
she fans Kazue’s hopes, desires, and beliefs that end up hurting Kazue

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Yoda / Japan Dossier / Feminine Aspiration, Feminine Malaise 197

so badly. The narrator describes herself in the present as an unmarried,

middle-­aged “freeter” (irregular worker on a part-­time job) and is proud of
who she is.23 Unlike Kazue and Yuriko, whose life and death fueled public
scandals, she claims to be content with being plain and ordinary.
Yet, her bitterness about her solitary and underachieving life seeps
through her words. Though she expresses nothing but contempt for Yuriko,
she grew up stewing in jealousy over her beautiful sister. She worked hard
at her studies because that was the one thing she was better at than Yuriko.
But her treasured admission into Q High was spoiled by her marginal status
in the elite school (a child of a failed marriage between a stern and parsi-
monious Polish father and a despondent Japanese mother) and further poi-
soned by the unexpected arrival of Yuriko.
Far from being a neutral witness, then, the narrator is invested in
illustrating Kazue as a preposterous failure. It stokes her vanity to claim that
she is too smart and too proud to covet the reward from the contest that
dealt her a poor hand. The novel’s title alludes not only to the over-­the-­top
portrayal of Kazue and the other principal characters, who break down and
turn monstrous as they struggle against their lots, but also to the presence
of the narrator looming in the shadow, spinning gothic yarns about these
freaks with creepy loquacity. The narrator’s interlocutor is never revealed
in the text, but Kirino, the author, hints that the narrator is speaking to her
own reflection in a mirror. Kirino writes that she wanted the narrator to
evoke “the other Kazue, the other someone, perhaps our own preoccu-
pation with ourselves that we are not aware of [ishiki shite inai jiishiki ].”24
The narrator’s venomous account of Kazue bespeaks her own excessive
self-­consciousness and her obsession with how she might be perceived
by others. Deploying the dubious narrator as its medium, Grotesque not
only cautions us against conflating Kazue with any real-­life model; it also
suggests that cynicism and the disavowal of ambition do not necessarily
neutralize the corrosive effects of being fixated with how one’s fortune
measures up against others’. Is there a way to stay ahead of the game of
rivalry? Grotesque’s answer to this question seems to be “no.”

23. Kirino, Grotesque, 16. It should be noted here that the term has come into broad
currency in postbubble Japan to refer to the expanded ranks of irregular and precarious
workers in the neoliberal labor market.
24. Kirino Natsuo, “Tōden OL satsujin jiken o moderu ni shita saishinsaku,” [A new novel
modeled on Tōden OL murder case] Sunday Mainichi, August 17, 2003, 115. The gram-
matical subjects put in brackets are ambiguous in the original.

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Middle-­Stream Subjectivity and the Neoliberal Present

Earlier in this essay, I suggested that Tōden OL has served as a

node in the discourse of contemporary femininity, which is entangled in
shifting, multiplying, and often conflicting standards of valorization. Naka-
mura Usagi sees in Tōden OL an impasse of feminine aspiration: “Many
women today are running after their ambitions, dreams, and fantasy, choos-
ing to work in companies, to work as freelancers, to get married, and so
on. But they are also carrying the deadly feeling that once in hand, these
desired trophies might just turn into junk.”25 The feminist critical perspective
on Tōden OL by Ueno and others urges us to see this hazard of feminine
aspiration not in terms of individual choices, achievements, and failures but
in relation to social and structural conditions surrounding femininity today.
Grotesque echoes just such a view, illustrating varied sets of pre-
determined conditions dooming feminine self-­realization whether through
work, domesticity, or sexuality. Just as emphatically, however, it draws our
attention to the folly of “aspirationism” itself. Kazue arrives at Q High as the
proud winner of an academic contest, eager to make her mark. But at the
school, she faces new forms of rivalry, in which hard work and determina-
tion play little role. Here, her assumptions about the world and her ambi-
tions begin to backfire, turning her competitive impulses into something
more destructive and all-­consuming.
The function of Q High as a formative environment for Kazue and
other characters has much to do with its liberalism as well as its elitism.
Students there were “encouraged to do whatever they wanted because
only they had responsibility for their own growth. Rules were lax and much
was entrusted to a student’s own sense of self-­determination.”26 Hence,
vicious hierarchy and exclusion play out, allowing the rich to flaunt their
wealth, the gifted to maximize their talents, the aristocratic inner circle to
shut out the outsiders, and the beauty to serve as a trump card. Competi-
tion is everywhere, but it does not constitute the stretched-­out field of mass
rivalry, where effort may not translate into victory, but it would at least earn
one a footing in the striving middle strata. Rather, at Q High, one is either
“in” or “out,” “winner” or “loser,” and victory is almost always going to those
who started out with the biggest advantages.
In a sly twist of historical referentiality, Grotesque sets up the exclu-

25. Ogura Chikako and Nakamura Usagi, Kōfukuron [A theory of happiness] (Tokyo: Iwa-
nami shoten, 2006), 79.
26. Kirino, Grotesque, 71.

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Yoda / Japan Dossier / Feminine Aspiration, Feminine Malaise 199

sive girls’ school in the 1970s as an environment that prefigures postbubble

Japan. Since the 1990s, Japan’s self-­image as a middle-­stream society has
been eclipsed by that of a neoliberal “gap society” (kakusa shakai ), which
tolerates deep cleavages between haves and have-­nots or high performers
and low performers, and is no longer committed to sustaining the broad
middle strata that competes over small differences and jockeys to move
upward. Grotesque depicts in Q High a drama of middle-­stream subjectivity
crashing and burning against the neoliberal modality of competition, explor-
ing both the terror of the latter and the poison of the former—the fallacy of
middle-­stream celebration of discipline, meritocracy, and upward mobility.
Thus, Grotesque not only addresses the sexism and misogyny per-
sisting (albeit in more dispersed manners) under the seemingly postpatriar-
chal shifts in society but also probes the lingering effects of middle-­stream
subjectivity haunting the gendered suffering in the present. Grotesque does
not offer ready-­made solutions to the problem of feminine malaise, which
debates over Tōden OL have raised. But it suggests that there might be a
small chance of surviving the horror of Q High while remaining attached to
the desires, affects, and beliefs shaped under the regime of mass rivalry.

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