Takemoto, Novala. Kamikaze Girls.

There are some books that make me want to dye my hair an outrageous color, buy a motor scooter, smoke cigarettes, take up manual labor, and be really cool. Well, okay, that's just this book.

Momoko is a high school girl out in the most boring part of Japan, to hear her tell it:

From top to bottom, rice paddies. Past, present, and future, rice paddies. All of creation, just rice paddies. There are a few vegetable fields, actually, but basically it's rice paddies.

Her one pleasure is taking the train into Tokyo on the weekends (a 2.5 hour commute each way) to shop at the Baby the Stars Shine Bright boutique, a monument to everything that is frilly and white and adorable--the Lolita style. This is a Japanese subculture that has nothing, really, to do with that book by Nabokov. See: here, and here, and here. Momoko attributes her love of BSSB to the "Rococo" lifestyle it represents, one of self-indulgence, decadence, and aesthetics. Me, well, it's always struck me as adorable, but there's no way a girl who wears size 12 shoes is going to pull off something that silly.

Anyway, to afford BSSB's extravagant prices, Momoko tries selling some of her dad's bootlegged Versace clothing and accessories--and in the process meets Ichigo. Ichigo is a biker chick who exudes cool despite only having a 50cc motor scooter and not even having a real motorcycle license. She is a yanki, everything that Momoko wanted to escape from with her extravagant Lolita clothes: low-class, uneducated, a girl who doesn't mind getting her hands dirty, and who in fact works part-time at a motorcycle repair shop. Ichigo, for her part, constantly mocks Momoko's "frilly-ass" clothing. Of course, they become friends. And what emerges is really a charming and exuberant story of unlikely friendship, and of identity: how we create it, how we define it, how our images define us.

The first 50 pages are background information, and the book takes a while to really hit its stride, but when it does, there's something intensely sweet and lovable about it. Which is not to say that I don't have my reservations; I suspect the book would not be completely opaque to someone who knows less about Japanese pop culture than I do, but it would probably be translucent at best, if you even cared about each and every item in Momoko's wardrobe. (It's surprising that Viz, of all publishers, didn't choose to localize the title more; perhaps they were going for that teeny bit of the market segment that already knows and loves Japanese fashion). And there are places where I don't know what do think about the translation. The sudden shifts between a sort of "valley girl" voice and a very refined, even pretentious one are perfectly suited to Momoko, but some of the sentences feel so stiff that I can't tell whether that's really Momoko's voice or just a bad translation.

Also, while this is marketed as a YA novel, apparently, Ichigo does say "fuck" rather a lot.

As far as I can tell, most books set in Japan and published for the YA market are ponderous and moralistic, bent on telling you something important about history and culture. Kamikaze Girls, written for a Japanese audience, is much frothier, sillier, and lighter. I like that; and I like its wholehearted embrace of silliness. And I like, especially, that underneath the pink and the squeeing there's something very honest, and very tender.