ジオラマ

by Natsuo Kirino

ベルリンのガイドで生計を立てる、美貌の男、カール。地方銀行に勤める平凡な会社員、昌明。金のため男に抱かれることに疲れ始めた、カズミ。退屈な生活。上下運動を繰り返す、エレベーターのような日々。しかし、それがある時、一瞬にして終焉を迎える。彼らの目の前に現れた、まったく新しい光景。禁断の愉悦に続く道か、破滅の甘美へと流れゆく河か。累卵の如き世界に捧げる、短編集。

Genres: Japan

294 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1998

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

[Victor Mondane]

Kirino's second collection of short stories partly overlaps with 錆びる心 Sabiru kokoro , as it is comprised of texts published between 1996 and 1998, but it also shows her growth as a writer. While having debuted as a crime fiction writer, her earliest short stories in the first collection have already shown she is more interested in exploring her characters than a convoluted mystery or even, sometimes, that much of a plot. Despite that, the stories here still have a strong sense of a mystery - usually involving people's pasts, identities, or desires. In the afterword to the paperback edition, Kirino talks about having enjoyed playing with rocks in the mud as a child, and how she loved to examine them, turn them over and dig in the earth to uncover what's underneath - a game she likens to her own writing process, and uses this metaphor to talk about the short stories in this volume in more detail.

Among these, "Idogawa-san ni tsuite" ("Regarding Mr. Idogawa") leans the closest to a traditional mystery. Here, the protagonist Ayabe is trying to find out whether the sudden death of the titular Mr. Idogawa, a popular, middle aged member of his karate club had been an accident, suicide, or something more sinister - only to find out that Mr. Idogawa was a two-faced creep and a far cry from the idealized figure the karate circle knew. Another story concerning a search for a person is "Yojireta tengoku" ("Twisted Heaven"), where a young Japanese-German stoner Karl, living as a tourist guide in Berlin, is hired by a mysterious Japanese woman. Karl's past is explored in the following story "Kuroi inu" ("Black Dog"), the longer and stronger of the two, where Kirino zooms in on the fraught dynamics of his international, intercultural family and, eventually, on Karl's own sexual abuse as a child.

According to Kirino's afterword, her own favorite in this collection is the first story, "Dead Girl". Inspired by a murder case in a love hotel, it is essentially a single scene taking place in a hotel room, reminiscent of Kirino's later masterpiece Grotesque, but reading it retrospectively also lessens its impact a little. Compared to her first short story collection, Kirino dares to lean more closely into an exploration of questions of identity, such as (repressed) homosexuality in "Rokugatsu no hanayome" ("June Bride") or the Karl stories, or class, economic upheaval and its individual, psychological effects in the titular "Diorama". The final story "Yoru no suna" ("Night Sand") is less than five pages long, but manages to be an evocative and haunting depiction of a woman's passing.

The subtle shifts between 錆びる心 Sabiru kokoro and Diorama signal similar shifts in Kirino's writing in general. After the success of Out, she increasingly pulls away from the framework of a crime novel, exploring other genres and refining the psychogical depth and aspects of her fiction with 柔らかな頬 Yawaraka Na Hoho , which also won her the prestigious Naoki Prize in 1999. The stories collected here therefore present more concise entry points into this phase of Natsuo Kirino's career than her longer novels from the same period.

[BaiLing · Rating 2 out of 5]

從作者的「本書後記」中，就可以明白這本包含九個短篇的小說的創作原因—寫下翻開一塊（地上）石頭，發現底下的世界的驚奇，或描寫那個世界。…翻開各種場所的各種石頭，那是短篇小說。挖掘更深層的地下世界，則是長篇小說的工作。

內容有被棄屍在賓館的年輕女子，〈死亡女孩〉；男同志結婚後在出櫃的想法中掙扎，〈六月新娘〉；只用十五頁稿紙寫替朋友house sitting的女子心中乖戾的念頭，〈蜘蛛網〉；年輕男子發現受歡迎的死去朋友，竟是的「跟蹤狂」的過程，〈關於土戶川先生這個人〉；日德混血的俊美導遊卡爾，無處可歸屬的人生態度，〈扭曲的天堂〉；繼續日德混血卡爾的故事，描繪其二十九歲時回憶少年時的日本生活〈黑狗〉；另一次用十五頁稿紙寫的故事，關於妻子接到結婚多年丈夫的小三來電，興起的一些重新認識丈夫的想法，〈蛇夫〉；模範丈夫、父親的男子在銀行工作不保後，外遇樓下單身女子，〈公寓全景〉；八旬老婦在臨終前的性慾幻覺，〈夜晚的沙子〉。

如果沒有後記說明，非文學評論專家的讀者（我）看這些故事，就是九個不知所以然的「切片」。某些篇突兀的結局硬生生讓閱讀情緒無來由的終止，期待的後韻無所依存。

啊！終於看完了！

[Kai-Te Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

因為是短篇，很能展現作者精煉的敘事能力，尖銳、殘忍，卻有時又語焉不詳，有時又是反轉，時而閃現的高光難以忘懷。

[K.C.Lin · Rating 3 out of 5]

桐野夏生早年的短篇小說
雖無太過驚艷，但是可以看到後來一些作品的樣貌
所有的作品都是這樣慢慢累積的，沒有什麼是一蹴可及的吧。

最好的就是同名的短篇〈全景模型〉
敘述名利雙收家庭圓滿的銀行員，在失業後和樓下鄰居發生外遇的故事。
兩層樓的對照非常有電影感。故意透過各種聲響影響對方，形成某種詭異的循環。