Product Description

This tale of sex and darkness is narrated by Lui, an alienated young Japanese woman who becomes disastrously involved with two dangerous men. Lui first meets her boyfriend Ama in a bar after finding herself mesmerised by his forked tongue. She immediately moves in with him and begins following him down the path to body modification by having her tongue pierced and planning a beautiful tattoo for her back. Ama's friend Shiba creates this exquisite tattoo and as he works on it Lui begins an illicit and brutal sexual relationship with him. Then, after a violent encounter on the back streets of Tokyo, Ama goes missing and Lui must face up to her choices...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54632 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

International Herald Tribune
‘Kanehara is an instant star’

New York Times
‘A powerful portrait of the post-bubble generation’

From the Publisher
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
A shocking and explicit story about obsessive love and Japanese youth counter-culture that sold over a million copies in Japan.

Customer Reviews

A very good debut
Only 100 pages or so, Hitomi Kanehara's first novel signifies a very good start to her career as a writer. The story follows a young teenage girl who has left home in her exploration of pain and pleasure through excruciatingly painful body modifications and violent sexual activities.

The writing is simple and powerful and will not fail to shock you and bring out powerful emotions in you. Although the characters are not everyday people you might have met, you will find it easy to identify with them in their lack of understanding of their own actions. Definitely a fresh look into teenage subculture.

Very slight
This is a very thin, indeed a very slight novel. Not only is it short, just over a hundred small double-spaced pages, it also has practically no story. A girl meets a guy, likes his split tongue, decides to get one herself, meets another guy and decides to get a tattoo like he has ...the first guy is killed, probably by the second guy, and at first she's so sad she stops eating, then for no apparent reason she gets over it and starts eating again. I guess I'm missing something, but 'so what?' was my constant question as I read this. I guess it all got lost in translation.

well-written but....
As with many contemporary Japanese writers, I found the sparse, uncluttered style of this novel appealing, but ultimately it was very difficult to connect in any way with the three central 'blank generation' characters. There was a whole fascinating subculture of extreme body modification to be explored here, but the writer just tinkered around the edges. I came away still not understanding why anyone would want to have their tongue pierced or expand ear-piercings to large holes.