I wanted to understand more about the situation.

I’m sure a large part of the reason is that they feel their futures are closed off and sealed. “People claim that many want nothing more than to settle down as housewives and let their husbands support them. “I think a lot of young women today are living in conditions of poverty that make it difficult for them to see any hope for the future,” she says. I met Kirino recently to talk about the background to this book and the process of putting it together. Will they somehow manage to find a way forward to a better future for themselves without getting caught up in crime and violence? The reader anxiously follows the progress of the three girls’ precarious lives together.

Mayu herself, her eyes still closed to the true nature of the business, remains tempted. To earn the money she needs, Riona sometimes complies with requests for “hidden options,” providing sexual services for her clients, but she is determined not to let Mayu get involved in this side of things. Mayu moves in and joins an odd ménage along with Riona and her friend Mito, who is pregnant with her boyfriend’s child. She finds a part-time job, but is raped and runs away-eventually she is rescued by seventeen-year-old Riona, who makes a living in the shady JK business and is camping out at the apartment of a University of Tokyo student who is one of her former clients. Relations between them deteriorate, and Mayu takes to wandering the streets of Shibuya. When her parents abscond from the family home, she is left in the care of an uncle and his family. The heroine of Anonymous on the Streets is Mayu, a 16-year-old in her first year in high school.

A sequel will be serialized in the Shūkan Asahi from next spring. In her 2018 novel Rojō no X (Anonymous on the Streets), she depicts female high school students who have lost their moorings and are exploited in the shady world of “subsidized dating” and the “ JK industry” (JK stands for joshi kōsei, or “high school girls”). Her novels portray heroines in difficult circumstances, and reveal the dark side and structural problems of Japanese society today. For more than quarter of a century, Kirino Natsuo’s bestselling novels have depicted women in a variety of desperate situations: housewives working the night shift at a food factory who get embroiled in murder, an employee at an elite company who finds fulfilment by selling herself on the streets at night, and a former member of the United Red Army who has kept her past a secret.

Out by kirino natsuo