Killer Children
By
KATHRYN HARRISON

“Sprinkle in some Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche or whatever. … Then sort of wrap it up like ‘Evangelion,’” the popular animated television series that pits paramilitary teenagers against enemy angels bent on destroying humankind. Worm, the cipher at the center of Natsuo Kirino’s disquieting and suspenseful novel “Real World” and a juvenile killer on the run, is directing Terauchi, one of the four girls who become his accessories, to write a manifesto to fit the crime he has committed. He’d like it to be “something creative” rather than “introspective,” a “cool” and “incomprehensible” poem or story. Otherwise, his readers might conclude he isn’t the disaffected nihilist he imagines himself to be. “It doesn’t have to be long,” Worm tells Terauchi, but it does have to be “better than what that killer Sakakibara wrote.”

“Real World” begins with a matricide. No longer willing to cooperate with the expectations of the “total idiot” who forced him to attend a prestigious high school even though he lacked the aptitude to succeed in such an environment, Worm bludgeoned his mother to death in what Terauchi, whose worldview allows no possibility of forgiveness or salvation, dismisses as a mindless, infantile response to frustration. Once Worm is on the run from the police, however, his photograph multiplying across the front pages of newspapers and broadcast on television — once he has time to contemplate his crime and the growing curiosity about his motive — his lazy anomie is dismantled by an intensifying self-consciousness. To answer his audience, he models himself on the infamous real-life killer whose literary efforts he wants Terauchi to surpass.

In 1997, a 14-year-old student from Kobe known by the pseudonym Sakakibara Seito beheaded an 11-year-old retarded boy with a handsaw and left the head at the entrance to his special school. After his capture, Sakakibara confessed to another murder, that of a 10-year-old girl whose head he had crushed with a pipe. Although he had exhibited the typical psychopathic precursors to murder, including the torture and killing of animals, Sakakibara sent a letter to the police claiming to be the product of Japan’s system of compulsory education. In the 1990s the crimes of Sakakibara amplified Japan’s growing anxiety about what it called a youth crisis, a fear that the increasing stresses imposed on adolescents could precipitate their becoming criminally insane.

Welcome to present-day Tokyo, where “air pollution advisories” announce the arrival of summer vacation and where vacation isn’t a holiday from the 11-month academic year, but a break to be spent in cram schools taught by brainwashed college students who advocate studying hard enough to “spit up blood” as the avenue to a “tremendous confidence … you can build on for the rest of your life.” For the contestants in this dystopic steeplechase, a cultural reference more potent than “Crime and Punishment” or “The Will to Power” is the homegrown “Evangelion.” And to “wrap it up like ‘Evangelion’” would be to drive a violent plot to apocalypse.

“Real World” is peopled by children. Adults are peripheral — alcoholic fathers, adulterous mothers, prying detectives, predatory marketing drones, pedophiles on the prowl for schoolgirls, none of whom merit the trust of adolescents who must submit to the wishes of parents they consider hypocrites and despise. Styling themselves as peroxided “Barbie Girls,” hard-studying loners or promiscuous “Good Time girls,” replacing their given names with ones of their own devising, like “Dahmer,” after the American serial killer, they worship the rare iconoclast who takes a stand against an educational system so oppressive that it sacrifices the development of character to scholastic achievement. In a society that values conformity — as the saying goes, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” — what matters isn’t that Worm arrives at fame through conscienceless violence, but that he manages to rebel. As Terauchi’s little brother observes, being “an elite kid who fell” is all that’s required to become “a hero.”

As she did in “Out,” the first of her dark tales of murder to be published in English, Kirino presents her readers with four distinct female types: Terauchi, the intellectual who declares herself “above human relationships”; Toshi, Worm’s next-door neighbor, who wants “to wear ordinary clothes and not stand out”; Yuzan, struggling to come to terms with both her homosexuality and her mother’s death; and Kirarin, a sexual adventurer with a fatal taste for excitement. United first by friendship and second, like the older women in “Out,” by their inability to resist involvement in a murderer’s attempt to evade capture, the girls keep in touch with the fleeing Worm by cellphone, Kirarin joining his flight from the authorities. Among the four, Terauchi reveals a distinctly Dostoyevskian conscience, judging her implacable rage at her mother for taking a young lover as evidence of depravity deeper than Worm’s. “In my heart I’d murdered my own mother long ago,” she confesses as she reviews the impulsive nature of Worm’s crime, one she decides is less “irreparable” than the malice that has “devoured” her soul.

Noir fiction generally posits a moral universe as deliberate and stark as that in the novels of Dostoyevsky, its plots unfolding in a moody urban landscape marked by corruption and incontinence, a setting that transcends its role as stage to become player. As Dostoyevsky did in “Crime and Punishment,” Kirino pushes her antihero to murder as a means of philosophical statement and communicates an authorial anxiety that contemporary social ills will destroy humanity. But while Dostoyevsky sets up a contest between Christian love and a pernicious nihilism that inspires barbarity, Kirino’s “Real World” offers no possibility of god or redemption.

A significant inversion, one that suggests an evolutionary difference between Dostoyevsky’s and Kirino’s visions, is that of cause and effect. Raskolnikov theorizes that certain “extraordinary” individuals have the right to act outside of conventional morality in service to a greater good. The murder he commits, of a parasitic moneylender, exposes the fallacy of what turns out to be less philosophical breakthrough than conceit, jeopardizing his sanity and his soul. Kirino’s Worm, on the other hand, child of a post-Nietzsche, consumer-driven society that has yet to address the ethical vacuum created by the Death of God, murders without considering the meaning or consequences of his actions. Only in retrospect, aware of his emptiness and lack of conviction, does he attempt to invent a philosophy to explain his crime.

From a writer who has declared Flannery O’Connor her favorite American author — one of the few whose obsessive focus on violence, epiphany and redemption equals Dostoyevsky’s — readers can expect a tour through the grotesque and the extreme. Together, Worm and his four female accessories maximize a dangerous situation’s potential for further destruction and mayhem. And the blood-soaked denouement of “Real World” does push one character a degree toward moral consciousness and transformation. As for Worm, he may kill off his fictional mother, but he serves his living creator devotedly. Novels “show you the real world with one layer peeled away,” he says for Kirino, “a reality you can’t see otherwise.”