By Natsuo Kirino.

Translated by Phillip Gabriel.

Knopf. 224 pp. $23.95.

'Isn't life disappointing?" asks a teenager in the film Tokyo Story, director Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 masterpiece. Fast-forward 55 years to present-day Tokyo, and things haven't changed all that much: The answer is still a resounding "Yes, it is."

Real World, the third novel published in English by the Japanese mystery writer Natsuo Kirino, is about the real disappointments and disillusionment faced by five middle-class high schoolers in Tokyo. But more than that, Real World uncovers the parallel realities and dark wonderland that the teenagers inhabit. Perhaps "dark" is an understatement. The novel begins with a matricide and ends with - sorry, I can't give it away.

Real World is told in the rotating voices of five characters who in their own chapters reveal their inner worlds. Worm is the nickname for the shy teenage boy, the antihero of the novel, who sets things in motion when he murders his mother with a baseball bat. He's a "lanky, stoop-shouldered boy, with small gloomy eyes. . . . He had a sluggish way of walking with his head tilted one side, and zero in the way of spirit. . . . Like if he stepped into the shadows he could hide from the world."

Worm is on the lam and steals his neighbor Toshiko's cell phone, proceeding to call her speed-dial friends, chat them up, befriend them, and hopelessly entangle them in his dark web. He takes turns talking to the four BFFs, who are archetypal teenagers.

Toshiko is the goody-two-shoes of the group. She loathes the adult world and uses an alter ego, the persona "Ninna Hori," in her dealings with adults to shield herself from their bad vibe. Terauchi is the "brain" destined for an elite college and success. Yuzan, a closet lesbian, is grieving for her mother, who died of ovarian cancer. Kirarin is the sensitive, sweet girl who has a secret life of frequenting bars and engaging in sexual mistakes.

Worm is at the center of this maypole, and the girls dance around him, fascinated by the rare opportunity to escape the boredom and normality of their lives, and unable to break away from his sociopathic magnetism.

It's difficult to break away from reading Real World. It's transfixing, and Kirino touches on much deeper issues than unlocking teenage diaries. She captures these youngsters at a turbulent and interstitial period of their lives, and like an updated sociological study, reevaluates a teenager's place in today's world.

By extension, she questions what "good parenting" is. There are no self-help lessons to be gleaned from the book, but it's apparent that Kirino believes teenagers and their parents have a lot more in common than they think they do: Both sides are self-involved, intolerant of each other's human frailties, and always think they're right.

The generation gap is one of the main themes in Real World, and the teenagers are ready to commit siege warfare on their elders. Ninna Hori (Toshiko) says, "We're different from our parents, a completely different species from our teachers. . . . In other words, we're completely surrounded by enemies and have to make it on our own." Her philosophy of life is simple: "Let's face it: The world is twisted. And rotten."

Worm escapes his parents' restrictions by sneaking onto his father's computer and surfing for porn. He's a bit of a peeping Tom who watches his neighbors bathe or make love when they forget to pull the shades down, and he steals a pair of panties from the neighbor's clothesline, too.

Toshiko describes Worm's mother, who is as dispensable as the other adults in the novel. "She has on silver-framed glasses and this bright red lipstick you know is going to leave marks on any teacup she uses. Get rid of the glasses and the lipstick, though, and I don't think I'd recognize her."

Worm complains, "You understand how disgusted I was with my mom? She was constantly smothering me. When I was in the bath myself, for instance, she'd be hovering outside next to the sink and I couldn't even come out when I finished. God, I hate her!"

Natsuo Kirino, a highly accomplished writer of 18 novels, four short-story collections, and an essay collection, and recipient of numerous awards, carves out her own literary niche. Real World is not exactly a thriller, a mystery or a whodunit. It's a psychologically complex story told in a breezy, adolescent way, reminiscent of Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan's groundbreaking French novel written in the similarly disaffected, world-weary voice of a teenager.

In both novels, teenagers plot, connive and use subterfuge, mistakenly believing they control the adults in their vicinity. Instead, they end up wreaking havoc and becoming the victims of the nihilism they manufactured: One wrong action can snowball and take on a sinister life of its own, barreling out of a teenager's control. Just like in the real world.