錆びる心

by Natsuo Kirino

「家出するなら夫の誕生日にしようと心にきめていた……」
人間のダークサイドを炙り出した作品集。

十年間堪え忍んだ夫との生活を捨てて家政婦となった主婦。囚われた思いから抜け出して初めて見えた風景とは。（錆びる心）
劇作家にファンレターを送り続ける生物学教師の“恋”を描いく。（虫卵の配列）
荒廃した庭に以上に魅かれる男の内面に秘められたもの。（月下の楽園）

魂の渇きと孤独を鋭く抉り出した六つの物語。

解説・中条省平

※この電子書籍は1997年11月に文藝春秋より刊行された単行本の文庫版を底本としています。

Genres: Mystery

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2000

About the author

NATSUO KIRINO (桐野夏生), born in 1951 in Kanazawa (Ishikawa Prefecture) was an active and spirited child brought up between her two brothers, one being six years older and the other five years younger than her. Kirino's father, being an architect, took the family to many cities, and Kirino spent her youth in Sendai, Sapporo, and finally settled in Tokyo when she was fourteen, which is where she has been residing since. Kirino showed glimpses of her talent as a writer in her early stages—she was a child with great deal of curiosity, and also a child who could completely immerse herself in her own unique world of imagination.

After completing her law degree, Kirino worked in various fields before becoming a fictional writer; including scheduling and organizing films to be shown in a movie theater, and working as an editor and writer for a magazine publication. She got married to her present husband when she turned twenty-four, and began writing professionally, after giving birth to her daughter, at age thirty. However, it was not until Kirino was forty-one that she made her major debut. Since then, she has written thirteen full-length novels and three volumes of collective short stories, which are highly acclaimed for her intriguingly intelligent plot development and character portrayal, and her unique perspective of Japanese society after the collapse of the economic bubble.

Today, Kirino continues to enthusiastically write in a range of interesting genres. Her smash hit novel OUT (Kodansha, 1997) became the first work to be translated into English and other languages. OUT was also nominated for the 2004 MWA Edgar Allan Poe Award in the Best Novel Category, which made Kirino the first Japanese writer to be nominated for this major literary award. Her other works are now under way to be translated and published around the world.

Reviews

[meeners · Rating 3 out of 5]

i think the key word to sum everything up is 異常. creepy and good short stories. i want to read her long novels now.

[Victor Mondane]

The title of Kirino's first collection of short stories translates to "Rusty heart", neatly encapsulating the six stories about its characters defined by their hidden, often repressed desires. Only coming out a few months after her breakthrough novel Out, it can be considered a snapshot of Kirino's early writing. But as such, Sabiru kokoro also shows her as a writer with a solidly established worldview and style. While she remains better known for her usually rather long novels, the tight focus, clarity and relative simplicity of these stories makes them as compelling to read as her long-form fiction. And while better known for her string of hardboiled novels during the early 90s, Sabiru kokoro also serves as a remarkable example of how noir was simply one of the frameworks under which Kirino would operate, and she would expand her scope considerably after Out. This collection is, in a way, a foreshadowing of that development.

The stories in Sabiru kokoro differ in their themes and tone, but they are tied together through the larger theme of what's lurking beneath an everyday, ordinary existance of her protagonists. The oldest published, "Gekka no rakuen" ("Moonlight paradise"), offers an interesting twist on the mystery genre; as would become typical of Kirino, the central intrigue is that of who the characters and their motivations are, rather than focusing on a specific event or crime at the heart of the story. "Jason" and "Neon" are most likely Kirino's first forays into dark comedy, a rare but always welcome turn in her writing (the 2002 novel Dark is another great example).

The title story "Sabiru kokoro" is perhaps the clearest indication of how Kirino's development as an author. It depicts a middle-aged housewife abandoning her family, after having plotted her escape for a decade, figuratively shacked to her household. She has to learn how to live on her own, eventually finding refuge in a peculiar, wealthy household as a caretaker. She would take up the premise of a housewife on a run again later, in her 2013 novel Dakara kōya, if arguably in a less effective manner than in this early short story.

[BaiLing · Rating 2 out of 5]

短篇小說集。

「蟲卵的排列」。女老師向熟識的雜誌女記者敘述和劇團有婦之夫外遇，因而導致自己離職的轟轟烈烈感情事件，但經女記者查證後才發現，其實一切是女老師自己的精神妄想。

「羊齒之庭」。從未對現狀滿足的男子，繼承家鄉小鎮父親的書店，結婚、生子，唯一的興趣是畫羊齒植物，並渴望有朝一日可以成為聞名的羊齒日本畫家。大學時期的女朋友有天忽然找來，和離了婚的有錢千金中年重逢，維持了好幾年的婚外情，在女友的幫忙下，畫家事業終於有了開始，然而面對女友要他離婚並開始共同生活的未來，本性軟弱、猶豫不決的個性，又再次成為決定未來的關鍵。

「傑森」。是這本書最有趣的一篇。在大學教書的男子宿醉醒來，發覺家中只剩在出版社任職的老朋友，似乎前一晚一起喝了酒並且在家過了夜。遍尋不著的新婚妻子留了張決裂的紙條出走，對前一晚發生的事情完全沒有記憶的男子開始進行解開謎團的工作，過程中發現自己有著「傑森」─電影十三號星期五裡的狂暴怪物─的外號。從在居酒屋打工的女學生、大學同學、老久沒連絡幫他取外號的人口中，才知道自己喝了酒後完全殘暴的醜態。故事最後結束在，跑回娘家的妻子在再三保障下回家，門開的那一剎那。

「月下的樂園」。喜歡老屋子的男房客，三不五時經由自挖的地道，跑到屋主老太太大宅第的大庭園，先是自得其樂後來甚至偷窺。故事最後，裝鬼嚇人的老太太，終於把男房客給嚇死，報了殺狗之仇。

「霓虹」。黑道小幫吸收了鄉下來的年輕人，本以為是個沒腦帶只想模仿黑幫角色的莽漢，但到了緊要關頭，才發現準備要把他犧牲掉的年輕人其實懂得珍惜生命，所以臨陣脫逃掉了。

「生鏽的心」。貌合神離的十年來償還先生「原諒」自己外遇，家庭主婦不告而別，最後在落魄大戶人家當傭人/看護。找到自己生存價值的女子，卻在和被照顧的病人談話中，發現自己的逃離丈夫，其實並不是一種決裂，反而是想要借由更深刻的傷痕，讓疏離的丈夫留下記憶而已。

並不是特別好看的書，也沒特別不好看。就只是借了，看完而已。