With little to no emotion, she reveals that no one wins. Is that all a woman can be? Beautiful, or not beautiful? Desirable, or not desirable? And if she is rather unattractive, could she at least be smart, or redeemed by some other way? Each character's tale of survival provides a meaty chance for Kirino to prod at this social prison, testing it for loopholes and weak spots.

A sheltered and sensitive girl, Kazue's encounters with the narrator and Yuriko evoke her own gradual spiral into what seems a perennial societal tussle between a woman, and the world's evaluation of her body. Their unsolicited rivalry enters the schoolyard, where Kazue Sato joins the mix. And the narrator, placed in constant comparison with Yuriko, inevitably develops a lifelong resentment for her. Her own mother is at a loss at how she produced such an abnormally perfect creature. Even as a child, she arouses the desire of every man, and the ire of every woman. Yuriko, the narrator's younger sister, is impossibly, unnervingly beautiful. Interspersed with diaries, letters and accounts from Yuriko, Kazue and Zhang, we are introduced to an ensemble of women, each grappling with questions of physical beauty and sex as parameters of female worth and power. A natural cynic, the narrator promises to explain everything she knows to the reader and begins a long tale from her childhood. Coincidentally, both women had become sex workers at some point in their lives, and on separate occasions, were strangled to death by the same customer, a man named Zhang Zhe Zhong. The story opens with an unnamed narrator, who explains that her younger sister, Yuriko and old classmate, Kazue Sato have been murdered.

In natsuo kirino