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Product Description

The Prize-Winning Cult Classic and International Bestseller with Over 1 Million Copies Sold

Describing a world as amoral and fascinating as the landscapes of Less Than Zero and Trainspotting, this novel about a young woman living in the violent world of Japan’s underground youth culture is both shocking and strangely beautiful.

Enchanted by the snakelike forked tongue of a stranger called Ama, nineteen- year-old Lui takes a walk on another side of life. Following Ama home the night she meets him, Lui straightaway moves in with him and begins making plans to have her own tongue pierced. Determined to push her boundaries further, she asks Ama’s strange friend Shiba to design an exquisite dragon tattoo for her back. But when Lui and Shiba begin an affair, Ama’s jealousy is stirred and the situation becomes explosive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1152688 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Released on: 2006-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 128 pages

From Booklist
Offsetting its highly conformist, nose-to-the-grindstone image, Japan maintains a subgenre of rebellious youth stories in literature and film. Kanehara's short novel, a winner of Japan's foremost award to new fiction writers, stands firmly in the subgenre's literary line. It has stirred a lot of sand because it includes plenty of deadpan sex, Kanehara was only 20 when it won the prize, and it is one of the first novels about Japan's newest adults, who, growing up after the Japanese economic bubble burst in the 1980s, know only a society no longer able to promise that good jobs will be especially remunerative or even obtainable. Lui is a freeter, or independent young adult, living on part-time jobs and affectlessly clubbing, drinking, drugging, and screwing. She meets literally fork-tongued Ama. She decides to have her tongue done likewise and becomes Ama's noncommittal lover, boffing tattooist Shiba on the side and never learning Ama's real name. Violence, heavy drinking, and death eventually disrupt this drama of youthful degeneracy that steadfastly rejects romanticism. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Back Cover
"Shocking, brutal, riveting, and best of all, well written."
—Marie Claire

"As unsettling and poetic as a fever dream."
—Elle

"A powerful portrait of [the] post-bubble generation."
—The New York Times

"Ever get the longing to conceal a video camera in a zone you’d never get a peek into otherwise? Hitomi Kanehara fearlessly takes us into the labyrinthine realm that makes up renegade Japanese youth culture."
—J.T. Leroy, author of Sarah

About the Author
HITOMI KANEHARA won the Akutagawa Prize for debut fiction in 2004, and her novel Snakes and Earrings became a runaway Japanese bestseller. Her second novel, Ash Baby, has already sold 300,000 copies.