In 1981, in the sleepy suburb of Milpitas, Calif., just south of San Francisco, 16-year-old Anthony Broussard murdered his 14-year-old girlfriend. What elevated the crime above a local matter was how Broussard bragged about it, guiding his school friends through the hills to show off the corpse. Some threw rocks at Conrad’s body. Others hid her under a pile of leaves. One girl took a radio station decal off the dead girl’s jeans.

A pact was made not to say anything. A full day passed before one student worked up the nerve to break the agreement, and report the incident to the police.

I was in college in Sacramento at the time, about an hour away from the crime scene. The sociological and moral implications became the main topic of discussion in our classrooms, living rooms, and pubs. How could gawking at the murdered body of a peer become a social activity? Had the violence of television and movies desensitized kids? Had anomie and loyalty trumped ethics?

Natsuo Kirino’s novel, Real World, struggles with some of the same questions. Set in the suburbs of contemporary Tokyo, Kirino’s novel, translated from the Japanese, revolves around a matricide, purportedly committed by the teenage son. Following the boy’s sudden disappearance, he becomes the intrigue of Toshi, his next-door neighbor and schoolmate, and her three girlfriends, all of whom, up to that point, had dismissively nicknamed him Worm.

As Worm’s fugitive status becomes national news, the girls become involved in his flight (often secretively and competitively), individually recasting Worm’s desperate scenario into a romantic one; a lawless heroism that each girl believes has the power to justify the dissatisfaction of her own life.

While Real World has the guise of a psychological thriller, it really is a novel that looks at the emotional vacuum of teenage culture, one less affected by a brutal murder and its emotional aftershocks than by the glow of its association with a manufactured outlaw. Kirino delves deeply into the feelings of isolation and hopelessness that each girl shares (although as characters they can come off stiff and slightly unrealistic). She works to understand how the girls can become so disassociated from their own moral center, ultimately insinuating that after being raised in a culture of texting, reality shows, etc., they’re looking for any connection to the feeling world.

Real World is set in early 21st-century Japan, yet it feels as though it is still asking the same questions that my friends and I were asking in California in 1981. Unfortunately.