Snakes & Earrings - Hitomi Kanehara

Snakes & Earrings (蛇にピアス hebi ni piasu) was published in 2003 and received the Akutagawa Prize. It had a good reception with the reading public, selling over one million copies, and was made into a film.

The story is centured on the 19 year old Lui. She begins a relationship of Ama, who has a forked tongue. He encourages her curiousity in body modification, and pursuades her to have her tongue pierced. She meets Ama's friend, Shiba, who is a tattoo artist and body-piercer. After having her tongue pierced, Lui returns to Shiba and asks for a tattoo. Shiba's price is sex. From then on, the story revolves around the love triangle, and Lui's growing dependence on alchohol.

Snakes & Earrings shines a light into the dark undercultures that are secretly thriving in modern Japan. It is not a complicated story and easy to follow. The thoughts of Lui are vivid, as she slowly evolves as a character to her own point of no return. Well worth reading if you want to see a darker, more psychotic side of Japan.