Innocent World

“A girl is finally freed from the clutches of her own DNA. The small step Ami takes is, I think, a giant step for humankind.”
—Kiyoshi Kurosawa, director of Cure

Innocent World

By Ami Sakurai

Translated by Steven Clark
Fiction/Sexuality
Trade Paperback, 128 pages, 5.5 x 7.75 inches
978-1-932234-14-5 / 1-932234-14-4
U.S.$11.95 / CAN$16.95

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Enter a world of nihilism and self-destruction. Enter a world of rape, incest, and trauma. Enter a world of violence, drugs, and prostitution. Enter an innocent world.

Ami believes in nothing, hopes for nothing, and turns tricks because it’s something to do. Her journey from the pit of despair to the precarious edge of something else captures the part of being seventeen that never makes it into words.

A razor-sharp novella whose sheer intensity elevates misanthropy to the level of art, Innocent World is the author’s first work to appear in English.

Higashino explains the premise of Naoko and the idea behind the main character:

Ami SakuraiAmi Sakurai made her name in Japan as a controversial journalist and columnist, exploring the Tokyo underworld of enjo kosai (compensation dating). Innocent World came out to an equally bemused and disgusted public, but has garnered for Sakurai a large following of young women who feel like finally, there is a voice for them. Sakurai is a writer for the Heidi Fleiss, Paris Hilton, Tracy Quan, Annabelle Chong generation of women—challenging our contemporary notions of female sexuality.

“In the latest scenes of modern Japanese society, you meet fragile, immoral, but pure-hearted teenagers like this girl. She’s a little bird, wandering in an empty nest.”
—Ryu Murakami, author of Coin Locker Babies

“Ami Sakurai’s writing well reflects the harsh and hopeless reality of today’s Japanese teenage girls. Sex and violence are the ways through which she makes painful contact with the world. She successfully combines the classic tragedy of incest with the futuristic science fiction of reproductive technology, overturning the image of woman as victim. Despite all the negative syndromes of a decayed society, her answer is still positive—I will survive.”
—Chizuko Ueno, Japan’s leading feminist and author of
The Theater Under the Skirt

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