A sentence out of a book can somehow become a mantra for our lives. One of the girls got her nick name from the Magna Oishinbo, about a girl whose mother died when she was a teen, just like the character's did. There is also some material related to Reading Life issues developed. We get a deep look into the minds of five very individual teenagers and a look at life in a Tokyo High School. We go on a terrifying cab ride, we watch a romance develop that will curl the hair of anybody who has teenage daughters, we see how important cell phones are to teens. There is a good bit of exciting action in Real World. To them it is another version of the story of how in the old days people had to walk ten miles to get to school in a blizzard. My daughters find it hard to believe that there was no internet when I went to college and no cell phone when my wife did. My wife and I often talk about how the girls are in a very different world than the one we live in.

As Natsuo Kirino brings us into the minds of the girls in the book I could not help but wonder 'hum is that what my girls are thinking during those long silences?'. I have three daughters, 11, 13 and 15 and at times my wife and I are quite bewildered by them, just as they are often frustrated by what they see as our purely capricious dictates. I could not help but react to this book in a very personal way. The girls relationship to the adult world they live in but are not yet a part of is dealt with very skillfully. (This is not a spoiler as it is on the back cover of the book.) The action of the book centers around the girls involvement with the boy, who is called 'Worm'. The boy has just beaten his mother to death. The novelĬenters around four teen age girls and male teenager neighbor of one of the girls. This is my third Japanese novel for the Challenge and in fact my third Japanese novel. Swati deals with how the book displays for us the developmental issues of teenagers Real World by Natsuo Kirino(2003, trans 2008, 208 pages) already been reviewed twice forĮmily focuses very well on the character development in Real World

Real world kirino