What comes next are some cops, some crooks, some bribes and payoffs and some more opportunities in the disposal business. Warning to all that when it comes to the translated dialogue – well . . . . In the dreary, exhausting hours of the nightshift at a boxed-lunch factory, four women have formed a friendship of sorts. They work side by side and chat briefly each night, always carefully guarding their troubling thoughts and personal worries. When Yayoi Yamamoto, a young wife and mother, kills her abusive husband, the others help her dispose of the body; however, they become bound to one another in an ever tightening web of conspiratorial intimacy, mutual suspicion, and protective self-interest.

Grisly moments with graphic violence and macabre humor punctuated the bigger themes that characterized this Japanese tale. In the US, the squeaky wheel gets the oil but in Japan, that wheel gets pulled off and tossed out. Kirino didn't gloss over the inequities experienced by women and immigrants. Wage discrimination was blatant and the "glass ceiling" was shatter-proof. So there was a steady and consistent depiction of the anomie within Japanese society, particularly for those who resided in high-cost Tokyo. When a society is thus structured, it is no wonder that volcanic discontent randomly explodes out.An exciting, disturbing read. . . . Kirino’s Tokyo is an unexpected place, far from the glamorous stereotype.”– Telegraph (UK) Yoshie, the eldest and most serious of the group, called Skipper on the food line for her determination and leadership, is a single mother with a girl in highschool and a mother-in-law paralysed in bed to take care of. The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s exploration of Out, a daring and disturbing psychological thriller set in contemporary Japan. Written by Natsuo Kirino, one of Japan’s most popular writers, Out won Japan’s Grand Prix for Crime Fiction and was an Edgar Award Finalist for Best Mystery Novel in the United States. Introduction I enjoyed the dark, bleak storyline which involves nightshifts at a creepy boxed lunch factory. The plot involves human dismemberment, lots of it. The last body-chop brought with it a particularly fun twist. Kuniko, for example, is tied to her work at the Bento factory because she sees herself as ‘ugly and fat’, meaning she’d struggle to find a more glamorous job. And by glamourous, I mean working as a secretary or as a bank clerk. Concluding the Mystery

When stones lying warm in the sun were turned over, they exposed the cold, damp earth underneath; and that was where Masako had burrowed deep. There was no trace of warmth in this dark earth, but for a bug curled up tight in it, it was a peaceful and familiar world. A feminist revenge plot meets social critique and hardcore horror in a startling Japanese mix of satire and sensation.”– The Independent (UK) Creo que lo más interesante de Natsuo Kirino es que, si bien, sus libros tienen diferentes temáticas, algunas con más suspense y otras con menos, siempre tienen un elemento común (o al menos en las novelas que yo he leído), el papel de mujer en la sociedad nipona con respecto al hombre. Hace un crítica de fondo importantísima, sobre como la mujer siempre es tratada en inferioridad con respecto al hombre, siempre se le exige más cosas con respecto a su conducta social o en el hogar. También hace un crítica bastante imporante al mundo laboral japonés con respecto a la contratación femenina y al trato que reciben estas en según que tipo de empresas. Truly a universal tale. . . . Kirino knows not only everybody’s business but everybody’s mind–her way with interior monologue is pungent and prismatic.”– The Village Voice Her work is reminiscent of American hardboiled detective stories, but her use of multiple narratives and perspectives provide "no authoritative master narrative . . . that finally reassures the reader which of the many voices one is to trust". [2] Her prose style has been described as "flat," "functional," and "occasionally illuminated by a strange lyricism." [9] Unlike most hardboiled fiction, Kirino's novels often feature a female protagonist such as her detective Miro Murano, who complicates the typical hardboiled role of females by becoming both detective and victim. [10] By doing this, Kirino "implicates [the reader] in the voyeuristic pleasure of the detective genre by making [the reader] conscious of [the] act of watching." [10] Kirino said she is fascinated by human nature and what makes someone with a completely clean record suddenly turn into a criminal.Idem, "Inside OUT: Space, Gender, and Power in Kirino Natsuo", Japanese Language and Literature 40/2 (2006): 197–217. She worked as hard as anyone at the factory, and when she came home, she felt like a worn-out rag. What she wouldn’t give to lie down and sleep, even for just an hour. Massaging her own stiff, fleshy shoulders, she looked around at the dark, shabby house. Kirino's works, such as Out, ask the reader what they would do if something awful happened to them. [4] By writing novels that people can relate to, Kirino hopes her novels can help her readers through hard times and be comforted. [4] She has apparently been successful in reaching readers emotionally; for example Kirino was approached by a woman who thanked her for the liberation she felt after reading Out. [4] After all that build-up it seems like a come-down to say that this is basically a story about four thirtyish, lower-class or lower-middle class Japanese women who work night-shift filling box-lunches in a factory. With the increasingly common globalized life-style, their lives and families are a lot like those in the USA. The women have money problems, of course, and to varying degrees, unloving husbands who have already left, are abusive, or are unfaithful. One husband is burning the family savings on gambling and prostitutes. Another husband is distant, living in a separate room and hardly speaking to his wife; the high-school aged son is now following the same pattern and has not said a word to his mother for more than a year. Daughters are useless; one steals money and another daughter appears only occasionally to dump off a child with grandma, steal money and disappear again. Most of Kirino's novels center upon women and crime. Typically, in her novels, such as Out, Kirino mainly focuses on women who do unimaginable things, which is why her books can be considered as “feminist noir.” [5] She writes in a convincing, realistic type of way, which leads to the greatness of her work stemming from "her ability to put us inside the skins of these women.” [5] This focus on more realistic portrayals of Japanese women seems to be a trademark of her work, found in many of her novels such as Grotesque. [7] She is also committed to giving women recognition in Japanese literature, where they are often resigned to sexual and domestic roles. The author recounts how a young man once told her that until he read Out, he “never realized that regular middle aged women actually had a life.” [1] Society, she says, takes advantage of powerless women and it is her goal to create empowered female characters to show readers the power of the “weaker sex.” [1] For these reasons, she has been called the "queen of Japanese crime." [9] In fact, the plot of Out has been described as a framework for her critique of "the problems of ordinary women in contemporary Japanese society." [9] Works in English translation [ edit ] Crime/thriller novels

With the focus on the struggle of women and with most of the men presented in the book coming across as either predators or useless, the novel could be also classed as feminist literature, but I find this classification also unsatisfactory. While Kirino pulls no punches in her descriptions of broken marriages, failures in communication and pervasive alienation, my feeling is that the author doesn’t have a hidden militant agenda: she simply describes the realities of a broken system and she doesn’t spare her feminine actors the same harsh critical light she shines on the men in the novel: There's just something about Japan that produces the grittiest, darkest, scariest, most realistic horror, psychological thriller, and suspense. The seedy underbelly of Japanese society is perhaps so successfully portrayed because so little has been embellished. And with the dark, empty surburban streets, so much is possible, so much can go unnoticed. In Natsuo Kirino's wonderful crime novel, Out, a sharp social commentary on Japan's patriarchal society and the situation for women and foreigners is tangled up with loan sharks, gambling, the yakuza and murder.A battered woman murders her husband. Three of her work friends help her dispose of the body, forming a sort of makeshift "girl"-gang of 30-to-60-year-olds. As they try to deal with the police, loansharks and other complications, they each discover a darker side to themselves than they knew before. Joshinki (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2008); English translation by Rebecca L. Copeland as The Goddess Chronicle (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2013) It turns out that he was a pervert but not the pervert. That storyline was completely dropped, we end up having no clue who he was or where he went, so in the end Kazuo ends up being the one parking lot pervert anyway.) In 1998 Out had won awards in Japan in both the Best Novel and Best Mystery Novel categories. After it had been translated into English, it was nominated for an Edgar Award in 2004. I can see why Out had garnered acclaim as it was nothing like what I had ever read from a writer in the English-speaking world. Perhaps it reflected some kind of "Japanese sensibility;" if so, then I'm unable to identify what that may be.