SNAKES AND ERRINGS by Hitomi Kanehara

There are very few books that I have read more than once. I can remember almost everything that I read, not sentence for sentence or anything, but the plot and characters remain real to me throughout the passage of time.

However, Snakes and Earrings is one of the few books that I feel the need to reread. I loved every word of it.

From the moment I picked it up, all 120 small pages of it, I knew that I would not be able to put it down. It begins:

“Know what a forked tongue is?”
“One that’s split in two?”
“Yeah, like the tongue of a snake or lizard. Expect that sometimes … they don’t belong to a snake, and they don’t belong to a lizard.”

Once I read those begging lines I was hooked. This short novel is a walk through Japan’s under culture of Barbie Girls, Punk Rockers, and body alterations.

The narrative is a first person account of a Barbie Girl geisha’s haphazard love affairs that are filled with rough sex and murderers.

If you have a couple hours on a dreary day and like under culture (that is almost mainstream in Minneapolis, can’t go anywhere and not see a tattoo or pierced flesh), this book is for you.

Kanehara, Hitomi. Snakes and Earrings. New York: Plume, 2005.

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