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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
Let's start with a few descriptors from the blurbs on the cover: nervy, perverse, dark, gruesome, depressing, daring, disturbing, brutal, unsentimental, scathing, gutsy, hair-raising. You get the picture.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.
The plot begins when one of the women kills her husband. The other three women agree to help her dispose of his body. The plot builds from two directions: the police are suspicious and start nosing around, and the Japanese underworld, the mafia-like yakuzas, take an interest and offer the women, shall we say, additional business opportunities. In effect, we have a black comedy that focuses on the inequalities of women in male-dominated Japanese society, which looks a lot like 1950's American society. (The book was originally published in Japan in 1997 and translated in 2003.) Women executives are paid less for more work; women are humiliated and driven out if they complain or object; men do what they want and women are just supposed to take it. One woman still takes care of her incapacitated mother-in-law, changing diapers and bathing her even though her husband, the invalid's son, has abandoned her. Why? Because that is what the society expects her to do.
But women aren't let off the hook by this female Japanese author. Much of the time their mutual "friendship" seems more like a reluctant foursome built around backbiting, jealously, blackmail and one-upmanship. In fact, most of the time they hardly seem to like each other, a situation that worsens as they get dragged in deeper by their misdeeds. In addition to the socio-economic class focus of the book, we learn a lot about Chinese prostitutes and ethnic Japanese-Brazilian laborers who are some of the very few immigrants groups that have been allowed into insular (pun intended) Japan, one of the most ethnically isolated societies in the world. This is quite a read filled with local color of 1990's Japan if you don't mind some graphic violence and sex.
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David Putnam author of the Bruno Johnson series. This book surprised me. I was not expecting to like--love it so much. It reminded me of A Simple Plan by Scott Smith (wish he'd write more books). It shows how unintended consequences can quickly spin out of control. A woman is put in an untenable situation, someone dies and she makes the best of a bad situation. It's really quite creative. I highly recommend this book to those who like dark noir with strong female characters.
David Putnam author of the Bruno Johnson series. ...more
This book taught me - how to cut a body in pieces and then dispose it off properly and earn money from it.
I read this scene twice because first time I forgot to take notes.
Speaking of the book, it is a good book if you leave out fillers and ending ( esp the ending).
I honestly don't have much to say about this one because after 300 pages I was bored and was literally skimming through the book.
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pre review :-
कमज
they say books teach you a lot many things, you never thought you should know.This book taught me - how to cut a body in pieces and then dispose it off properly and earn money from it.
I read this scene twice because first time I forgot to take notes.
Speaking of the book, it is a good book if you leave out fillers and ending ( esp the ending).
I honestly don't have much to say about this one because after 300 pages I was bored and was literally skimming through the book.
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pre review :-
कमजोर दिल वाले दूर रहे
What the hell was that? Seriously
2 stars ⭐/ review to come.
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tbr review :-
The other day I searched "most disturbing books" deliberately and I found
this list . Out was the only asian book so I knew I had to read this.
Fear dwells in the furthest nooks and corners of Masako's subconscious - fear of the anonymous, faceless attacker who has been assaulting women in the quiet Tokyo suburb lately. Fear of not doing enough to hold together a slowly disintegrating family. Fear of venturing so close to the edge of madness that oblivion may seem a welcome prospect in place of retaining memories. Fear of breaking free.
And yet Masako musters up a stony indifference, makes unwavering courage and resourcefulness her weapons of choice. Even in the face of monstrous evil that spreads its tentacles from the yakuza-governed seedy underbelly of the night for the purpose of macabre revenge, she does not blink. Masako does not believe in surrender as a choice. She wants out and she will secure an escape route.
She stared at the stark white area on her finger in the November sunlight. There was something pathetic about this band of pale skin, the mark from a ring that hadn't been removed in eight years. It was the mark of loss. But it was also the mark of liberation, a sign that everything was finally over.
'Out' is genuinely unsettling in the sense it fleshes out a nightmarish scenario with nary an inhibition. It forces us out of our comfort zones repeatedly and without mercy. To legitimize the aforementioned claims let me mention it features scenes of graphic violence against women and a psychotic rapist-murderer. Not a cartoonish villain who cackles with maniacal laughter while sodomizing his victims and cutting them up into little pieces but a more or less rational individual whose human impulses have been distorted beyond recognition. All his convoluted thought processes are so lucidly explicated that one cannot help fathoming a perverse kind of logic in them. And this is the aspect that sent shivers down my spine - the fact that I came close to feeling empathy for a rapist like the woman who survived his attacks. 'Out' does not attempt to slay any proverbial demons but coaxes us to look them in the eye and recognize the possibility that all acts of patriarchal oppression are underpinned by some coherent rationale, no matter how one-sided and brutal.
While he was inside, he'd been haunted by the memory of torturing her to death - but what troubled him wasn't guilt so much as the desire to do it all over again. Ironically, though, when he finally got out, he was completely impotent. It wasn't until some years later that he realised the intensity of the moment when he'd killed her had somewhow shut him off from the more mundane experience.
To a great extent, misogyny constitutes the thematic backbone of this fast-paced novel, given that it lists the manifold ways in which a patriarchal social order limits a woman's access to personal liberties, righteously punishing her for any defiance. Aside from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, this is the only book (I've read) which masterfully avoids a ham-fisted treatment of a rape scene and stops short of reducing both victim and perpetrator to the status of dehumanized participants in a horrendous act.
All said and done, I have a feeling this review will either generate some interest in prospective readers or turn them off so completely that even the name Natsuo Kirino will only inspire revulsion. I certainly hope the former sentiment prevails with most.
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And then, this whole S&M dark and violent erotic stuff comes out, which threw the entire book in downward-spiral away from nuanc
What a disappointing ending! At first, I was absolutely entralled by the characters and their various relationships. The first 3/4ths of the book are filled with so much texture - it felt like I was running my hands through a fabric store. Most intriguing are the female-female relationships ranging from trust to need to fear. How I hated Kuniko! How I rooted for Masako!And then, this whole S&M dark and violent erotic stuff comes out, which threw the entire book in downward-spiral away from nuance and substance to blatant sex and desire. I thought Masako was stronger than the Stockholm syndrome! I forced myself to finish and can say that while I did enjoy reading about underground Tokyo - why would anyone waste their time reading about it when they can watch a movie that is effortless and as simple?
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Masako works in a bento (boxed-lunch) factory on the night shift with her workmates Yoshi, Kuniko and Yayoi. Together they make a team to get the best spots on the conveyor belt, and because they're housewives with responsibilities during the day, they're more or less each other's only friends. Each has problems: Masako and her husband barely interact anymore and her son hasn't spoken to her in a year; Yoshie is widowed and takes care of her daughter and her bed-ridden mother-in-law in a tiny house that's ready to be knocked down; Kuniko's husband has left her and taken all their money, and she's over her head in debt because she's constantly buying new clothes to impress people; and Yayoi's husband has spent all their savings on gambling and a beautiful Chinese hostess called Anna. Their lives are circumscribed and lonely, and there seems to be no way out for any of them.
Then one night Yayoi's husband Kenji comes home and in a fit of cold rage she strangles him. In desperation she calls cool, sharp Masako, who calmly handles the situation by enlisting Yoshi to help her cut up the body in her bathroom and then get rid of the bags of body parts in the rubbish collection sites around the area. Kuniko, always with an eye out for a way to make money, gets drawn into the mess as well - which turns out to be their downfall. Unreliable and delusional, Kuniko does a poor job of disposing of her bags and the body is soon discovered and identified.
Things seem to be working out though when the police arrest their main suspect, a casino owner and pimp with a scary past, Satake, who punched Kenji and threw him down the stairs after warning him to stay away from Anna, his number one girl. Satake, innocent of the murder, suspects Kenji's wife - and he isn't the only one who figures out what really happened. As things start to unravel, Masako becomes the focus, and the sense that someone is watching her, that a trap is tightening around her, threatens her calm composure and orderly existence.
This isn't a "whodunit" crime novel, nor a formulaic one. This is original literary crime that would not adapt well to any other setting but Japan - Tokyo in particular (where the novel is set). Having lived in the country for three years, I found myself living there again while reading this book: the descriptions, the characters, their reactions and motivations, it was all so very real, so believable. The weather for instance - hot and humid and wet in summer, the smell and the sweat, it all came back so clearly. The attitudes, too, and the urban landscape - rice fields in-between factories, run-down houses squished along allies, bicycles and umbrellas and the rubbish collection spots.
One of the wonderful things about this book is the way it is written. Despite one or two obvious metaphors, the prose has a tight, tense yet steady, patient rhythm, creating more suspense along the way by never hurrying. The chapters alternate in point-of-view narration between the main characters, with their personalities coming through strongly despite the fact that the tone doesn't change. I want to find an example, and really, I don't have to look far:
She could hear a horn tooting somewhere nearby, the sound tofu trucks use to advertise their wares, and, through the open windows around her, the sound of dishes rattling and televisions blaring. It was the hour when the women of the city bustled around their kitchens. Masako thought of her own neat, empty kitchen and her bathroom where the deed had been done. It occurred to her that lately she felt more at home in a dry, scoured bathroom than a busy, homey kitchen. (p.146)
He had been a model of self-control, had worked so hard to keep his dark side sealed away. But he knew that even a hint of what he'd done would terrify other people. Still, only he and the woman herself knew the truth about what had happened, and no one else could understand what he'd been up to. It had been Satake's misfortune to taste the forbidden fruit when he was twenty-six, and he'd been cut off from the normal world ever since. (p.179)
As far as the social commentary aspect goes, it's a biting, unglamorous look at Japanese society, and also a revealing study of the plight of the impoverished, exhausted women like Yoshi, the greedy, superficial consumers like Kuniko, the intelligent, hard-working but discriminated and underpaid "office girls" like Masako had been; and the victimised housewives like Yayoi. The lengths these women go to for some money, for escape, for freedom have devestating consequences for all of them.
The play between genders is also explored, or rather, held up for review - it may come across as old-hat, but don't forget this is Japan, which is still confined by many traditions that see women and foreigners subjugated and restricted to the role of second-class citizen. Despite the deeply flawed characters and the things they do, Masako emerges as a strong heroine, and even the male characters I felt some sympathy for. The blurb describes it as having a "pitch-black comedy of gender warfare", and that's definitely an intrinsic part of this novel. Sometimes, though, it was just too hard to find the irony amusing.
There's a lot more I could say about this book but really I just want to stress how much I loved it. I came across only one typo (an "is" instead of "it"), which is almost unheard of. And if you're put off by the Japanese names, here's a quick lesson: Japanese, when converted into Romaji (our alphabet), is very easy to pronounce. Each "letter" translates into five vowels, an "n" sound and consonant-vowel pairings. So "Masako" is pronounced "Ma-sa-ko". Easy. "Yayoi" is pronounced "Ya-yo-i" ("i" as in "easy", but a short sound). "Satake" is pronounced "Sa-ta-ke" ("ke" as in "kettle"). "Kazuo" is pronounce "Ka-zu-o" or "kaz-u-o". "Shinjuko" is pronounced "Shin-ju-ku". See: easy! There's a great rhythm to it, like those clapping games. Unless there's a double vowel, vowels and pairings are pronounced with short sounds, generally. There's no "r" or "v" in Japanese, so these letters are given an "l" and "b" pronounciation. "Tsu" is the most difficult sound for foreigners to make, and we don't have an equivalent.
While I'm at it, it may be helpful to get the money conversion: 1000 yen is roughly about $10, 10,000 yen is $100 and so on. Just imagine a decimile point, or remove a zero, something like that. So when Yayoi pays Yoshi and Kuniko 500,000 yen for their part in getting rid of her husband, that's about $5000, and when she talks about getting 50 million yen insurance money, she is getting about $500,000. (Hope my maths is holding up here!)
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If this book is to be believed, Japanese women are surrounded by chauvinistic, sadistic a-holes, cruelly remote ghosts, or losers who spend all their money with a nasty smirk. Or they are jerks-in-the-making, sullen teenagers who can go a year without saying a single word to their mothers, conveying hate through their angry eyes. At best, they're cowardly, bumbling, social pariahs... or dead.
Also, these po
Women have it tough, all over the world, but now I know they have it tough in Japan, too.If this book is to be believed, Japanese women are surrounded by chauvinistic, sadistic a-holes, cruelly remote ghosts, or losers who spend all their money with a nasty smirk. Or they are jerks-in-the-making, sullen teenagers who can go a year without saying a single word to their mothers, conveying hate through their angry eyes. At best, they're cowardly, bumbling, social pariahs... or dead.
Also, these poor Japanese women are "done" by "middle age". Our protagonist, a strong, intelligent lady of 43, is repeatedly described as being too old for men to notice, for being spry for her age. One unhinged character keeps wondering how in the world he could be attracted to someone SO OLD. WTF, Japanese men? W the actual F? And WTF, Kirino-san?
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.
I also was intrigued by the sense that everyone in Japan is being observed, that this high density living elicits watchful eyes and a distinct lack of privacy that makes play-acting a constant necessity. Thanks to nosy neighbours and prying strangers, nothing remains secret for long. People speak in stilted, unnatural dialogue that is polite to the point of being funny (either that, or there was something lost in this translation).
Then, the ending happened, and I pretty much hated every second of it. I felt like the author was really getting her rocks off with this ridiculous and horrible rape-fetish ending. She had so much fun writing it the first time, she had to repeat the whole torture porn scene AGAIN, take two, from the other person's perspective. It made me so grumpy, I can't be bothered to figure out what she was trying to say about men and women. I don't think it can be anything important.
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Predictable books are the worst, and for the most part I do not read synopses. I decide what to read based on friend reviews/recommendations and, yes, the absolutely risky business of buying media based on pretty packaging. I dug the cover of this
Reviewing good books has always been difficult for me. Not because I don't know what to say, but because I don't want to say too much. Part of the wonder of reading, for me, is discovery, and I want you to be able to discover this book for yourselves.Predictable books are the worst, and for the most part I do not read synopses. I decide what to read based on friend reviews/recommendations and, yes, the absolutely risky business of buying media based on pretty packaging. I dug the cover of this one, and the ever-awesome Barks five-starred it, so I bought a used paperback on Amazon.
Sometimes, when fishing, you reel in treasure instead of fish. This is one of those times. A book of this length would normally take me two or three days to read. I read Out's 400 pages in 10 days, savoring every sentence.
Alas, this review is going to suck. Because I cannot tell you a single thing I liked about Natsuo Kirino's Out. Everything would be a spoiler. I'd much rather you go in blind.
Suffice it to say, this is a strikingly bleak novel about four women who seem at first to be caricatures instead of characters: the ugly one, the old one, the pretty one, and the experienced one. But I assure you, these ladies' lives and personalities are far deeper than what you see on the surface. The brutality herein is balanced by pitch-black humor, and the ending is thought-provoking. Bring your thinking caps.
In summation: I want everyone to read this, even if the book will not be for everyone. Mainly because I want to hear what you folks think about the book as a whole. I consider it a darkly-beautiful, disturbing piece of fiction. It won't make you feel any better about humanity, but it will make you consider how close everyone is to the edge. All those are compliments coming from me. Highly recommended.
Final Judgment: A bleak beauty.
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The novel tells the tales of four women, working the graveyard shift at a Japanese bento factory. All four women live hard lives. Masako, the leader of the four women, feels completely alienated from her estranged husband and teenage son.
Kuniko, a plump and rather vain girl, has recently been ditched by her boyfriend after the couple were driven into debt, leaving Kuniko to fend off a loan shark. Yoshie is a single mother and reluctant caretaker of her mother-in-law, who
アウト = Out, Natsuo KirinoThe novel tells the tales of four women, working the graveyard shift at a Japanese bento factory. All four women live hard lives. Masako, the leader of the four women, feels completely alienated from her estranged husband and teenage son.
Kuniko, a plump and rather vain girl, has recently been ditched by her boyfriend after the couple were driven into debt, leaving Kuniko to fend off a loan shark. Yoshie is a single mother and reluctant caretaker of her mother-in-law, who was left partly paralyzed after a stroke.
Yayoi is a thirty-four-year-old mother of two small boys who she is forced to leave home alone, where they are abused by their drunken, gambling father, Kenji. ...
تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز دوازدهم ماه فوریه سال 2021میلادی
عنوان: ورطه (خارج)؛ نویسنده ناتسوئو کرینو؛ مترجم سعید کلاتی؛ تهران نشر گویا، کتاب کنج، 1399؛ در 628ص؛ شابک 9786226528641؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ژاپنی؛ سده 20م
کتاب «ورطه» اثر «ناتسوئو کرینو» با ترجمه جناب «سعید کلاتی» توسط انتشارات خانه فرهنگ و هنر گویا در 629صفحه در سال 1399هجری خورشیدی؛ به چاپ رسیده است؛
این رمان جایزه ی نویسندگان اسرارآمیز «ژاپن» را، از آن نویسنده ی خود کرده، و ماجرای قتلی خانگی، و بیرحمانه را، به تصویر واژه ها میکشد، که ریشه در فشارها، و تعصبات اجتماع دارد؛ باورهایی که به ظهور خشونتهایی پنهان، به ویژه در وجود زنان، که بیشتر نسبت به مردان، در جایگاه پایینتری در نظر گرفته میشوند، و بروز آن، به شکلهای گوناگونی که یکی از خشونت آمیزترین آنها، قتل است، منجر میشود؛ «ورطه» اثری تکان دهنده، درباره ی فشارها، و تعصباتی است، که زنان را، به کارهای بیرحمانه وامیدارد، و همچنین، دوستیهایی که، از پس عبور از خشونتها، آنها را نگهبانی میکنند؛ هیچ چیزی در ادبیات «ژاپن»، ما را برای «رئالیسم» اجتناب ناپذیر، پر از تعلیق، و پیرنگ محور، این اثر رازگونه، و تحسین شده ی «ناتسوئو کرینو»، آماده نمیکند؛ این رمان دل انگیز، داستان کشتاری بیرحمانه، در حومه ی آرام، و بی سر و صدای «توکیو» را، بازگو میکند، مادری جوان و شاغل، که در شیفت شب یک کارخانه ی بسته بندی غذاهای آماده، شوهر زورگویش را، خفه، و سپس، با یاری همکارانش، جسد را نابود، و جنایت خود را، پنهان میکند؛ سپس، «ماساکوی» باهوش، مغز متفکر این نقشه، دست به کار میشود، اما خیلی زود، درمییابد که تازه اول ماجراست، این قتل، خشونت پنهان زیر پوست جامعه ی «ژاپن» را، رو میکند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 25/11/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
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"What's up? Are you taking the night off?"
"No, I just don't know what to do."
"About what?" She sounded genuinely concerned. "Has something happened?"
"It has." She might as well get it over with. "I've killed him."
Three Tokyo factory workers get sucked into the proverbial web of lies and deceit when they help a fellow employee dispose of the body of her murdered husband. The author goes into a disturb
You know how sometimes you answer a phone call, and suddenly . . . your life is changed forever. "What's up? Are you taking the night off?"
"No, I just don't know what to do."
"About what?" She sounded genuinely concerned. "Has something happened?"
"It has." She might as well get it over with. "I've killed him."
Three Tokyo factory workers get sucked into the proverbial web of lies and deceit when they help a fellow employee dispose of the body of her murdered husband. The author goes into a disturbing amount of detail here. One wonders how she knows so much about chopping up a body. Then again, like her characters, women who are used to butchering all manner of critters - meat is meat. One of the ladies even exclaims, "exactly like a broiler."
There is a certain black humor at play here, which is good as the Kirino takes us to some dark, dark places. As expected, the story becomes much more convoluted, involving the police, loan sharks, AND yakuza. The characters are complex, and vividly drawn, making the tale even more compelling. Everything is at stake for these women, so it's almost certain that jealousy, greed, and human nature will expose their misdeeds.
"She seems to think we're guiltier than she is -- even though she's the one who killed her husband."
If you've got a ballsy bookclub that doesn't mind some gruesome violence, this book would be great fodder for one helluva discussion.
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Women in Japan, where the book is set, are supposed to do all the housework, their outside job, and take care of all the members of the household, Out is so gritty and grotesque, so violent, that I was revolted many times, but there is such truth amidst grim reality here, especially in how women are treated in society. I noticed that one of the other reviewers wrote about how this reminded him of the 1950s in the US, but wage suppression and inequality is still going in good old 2018 in the US.
Women in Japan, where the book is set, are supposed to do all the housework, their outside job, and take care of all the members of the household, oh wait, that's just like the US. Sorry about the rant. This story's 4 main female characters are firmly fleshed out, I felt like I knew them. Kirino does a fine job of characterization, dialogue, and scene setting. This is the underbelly of Japan in the 1990s, but like I said it could be any country. We've all got the maniacal, misogynistic bosses, distant husbands and children, obnoxious in-laws, psychopathic rapists and various other creeps who make up this motley crew. I felt sorry for the women, especially Yoshie who had a disabled mother-in-law, 2 ungrateful daughters, a dead husband, no money, a crappy job and a teeny tiny house to take care of them in.
This book is only for the stout-hearted as there are descriptions of 2 beyond brutal rapes and dismemberment of corpses. It keeps you hopping and I never ever guessed how it would end and like other readers I didn't care for the ending and disagree with it wholeheartedly ...more
This work is a gem. It amazes me I had it in my bookcase for a full year before realizing what it offered (though Frank had seen its potential immediately). It never even pestered me for attention. It just waited its turn politely. What a well-behaved thriller. You'd almost think it was innocent.
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After Keigo Higashino's books, this was my second thriller by a Japanese author and I'm amazed to see how much variety there is in the plot of J- crime books. They've got distinctive and compelling story-line that just draws you in. That being said, 'Out' is a dark, gruesome, disturbing psychological thriller with the themes of violence, sex. It was creepy and eerie and I found myself unable to stop reading. I was drawn to the despairing world and I found myself sympathizing with the characters.
The four main characters Masako, Yoshie, Kuniko, Yoyoi are unable to escape the drudgery of their work and life. All of them, in one way or another, are caught up in a miserable and hopeless existence of working at a backbreaking and unfulfilling job, with fallen apart relationships, abusive or unresponsive or dead husbands, unable to earn enough to get buy or taking more loans than is possible to repay etc. All of them are dissatisfied with their lives but are unable to escape it.
"You know," she murmured, "we're all heading straight to hell."
"Yes," said Masako, giving her a bleak look."It's like riding downhill with no brakes."
"You mean, there's no way to stop?"
"No, you stop all right – when you crash."
The murder proves to be a major factor in disrupting their lives and something that changes the dynamics of their 'friendship'. We get to see how their world is turned upside down when the deep-seated emotions inside them come to surface. Their desperation leads to the women throwing away their moral scruples in the world where they've no power and control over their mundane lives. The characters felt real and I could feel their pain and understand the reason behind their actions.
Apart from the four characters, they were some other interesting characters. There's Kazuo, a Japanese-Brazilian working at the factory seeking a better life; Satsuke, a night club owner battling his own demons; Jumonji, a loan shark wanting to make money and other Yakuza members. The book is a page-turner and captures the bleak atmosphere of the criminal life, the sleazy night clubs, and the tough night shifts. We get a closer view of the Japanese society and their worldview like the conservative opinions regarding women and not readily accepting of foreigners.
The story never gets predictable and keeps you guessing until the end. I also like how it's written from different perspectives, it gives a little insight into their mind and past experience. Apart from that, if you're planning to read this book then you should know it's definitely not for everyone as there are graphic violence scenes at places. Otherwise, it's a well-written thriller surrounding crime but focused mostly on ramifications of it on the people involved in the crime.
I definitely recommend it.
Read On Blog
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'You know,' she murmured, 'we're all heading straight to hell.'
'Yes,' said Masako, giving her a bleak look. 'It's like riding downhill with no brakes.'
'You mean, there's no way to stop?'
'No, you stop all right – when you crash.'
Four women working on the graveyard shift in a food packaging factory in a decrepit suburb of the metropolis. Four tales of despair and loneliness in a world that seems determined to crush the last shreds of their spirit. It's only a matter of time before one of them sn
'You know,' she murmured, 'we're all heading straight to hell.'
'Yes,' said Masako, giving her a bleak look. 'It's like riding downhill with no brakes.'
'You mean, there's no way to stop?'
'No, you stop all right – when you crash.'
Four women working on the graveyard shift in a food packaging factory in a decrepit suburb of the metropolis. Four tales of despair and loneliness in a world that seems determined to crush the last shreds of their spirit. It's only a matter of time before one of them snaps.
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I would be lying if I said I didn't struggle with this novel. I was equally repulsed by the graphic, almost casual depiction of cruelty, selfishness and strife and fascinated by the slow-motion unfolding of the promised trainwreck in the lives of the protagonists. Kirino is an extraordinary talented storyteller, but the stories she has chosen to tell are so bleak, so depressing that I found it hard to push myself to read on, especially while being isolated in my home in the middle of a global pandemic: as if I needed no more proof of our capacity for cruelty and indifference to the suffering of our fellow men or, in this particular case, of the raw deal women still have to cope with in this male dominated modern world.
This is a crime story, as a case of domestic violence devolves into murder, followed inexorably by complications as Yayoi, Yoshie, Kuniko and Masako are brought together by the need to hide the body. The realistic setting, the sense of impending, unavoidable doom makes it easy to fit the story within the 'noir' genre of crime fiction. But for me this is too simplistic a view for a complex novel which transcends such limitations. While some people have focused on the graphic details of murder and violence to argue in favor of a horror shelf, I would rather fancy an 'existentialist' label or even a 'dystopian' society, if we accept the fact that for many of us such a dystopian future has already arrived, and we are living in it right now.
She pulled up her T-shirt and found a blue-black bruise just below her chest. The sight of it seemed like the final sign that she and Kenji were finished. She let out a long sigh. As she did so, the doors to the bedroom slid open and Takashi, the older boy, looked out at her with fear in his eyes.
'Mama, what's wrong?' he asked.
'Nothing, honey,' she managed to get out. 'Mama fell down, but she's fine now. Go back to sleep.'
Yayoi, the prettiest of the thirty-something night shift workers, has a decent house, two small children and a husband working in a good job. Yet she needs to work in the factory since Kenji has started to spend all their money on gambling and easy women, coming home drunk and angry enough to kick his wife around for complaining.
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.
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.
She wished suddenly that she were a different woman, living a different life, in a different place, with a different man. 'Different', of course, meant several rungs up the ladder. These rungs on the ladder were everything to Kuniko, and only occasionally did she wonder if there was something wrong with her incessant daydreams about this 'different' life.
Kuniko, the fashionable one, is a delusional middle aged woman living above her means, deep in depth to loan sharks and in denial about her own abilities.
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.
Finally, Masako is the quiet, introverted one who comes forward when the hard choices have to be made and strength of character is the only thing that can save the four women from prison or from something even worse. That is, if the other women are prepared to follow Masako down the dark road they have been forced to take.
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:
One after the other, vain Kuniko ( She had always found the thought of anyone else's happiness almost unbearable, and she was easily convinced that she was getting a raw deal. ), pretty empty-headed Yayoi and even the reliable Yoshie will crumble under the pressure, leaving Masako to confront the final battle on her own. Fear, greed, envy, exhaustion take a heavy toll on the casual friendship the four women have developed in the factory. When you throw murder and a lot of money into the mix, the results are rather predictable, which brings me back to my earlier observation about human nature: Kirino is merciless on the reader's peace of mind and she spares us nothing of the dark side that lurks within most of us, waiting just for the right amount of pressure to makes us break.
Dissolved in a whirlpool, drained, rinsed and spun dry – it was precisely what they'd done to her. A pointless spin cycle, she thought, laughing out loud.
Since I have no intention of discussing the actual plot of the novel, I would like to give a few examples of why I hold Kirino in such high regard as a writer, despite my reservations about the bleakness of the setting. This is only my first book from the author, but I was impressed by how she can transition from gory to analytical then to lyrical from one page to the next. Her prose has both clarity and emotional intensity, delving deep into the psychology of her characters. She handles a complex plot and multiple voices almost effortlessly, both male and female, with scalpel sharp observations and minute details of actions, gestures, words that unveil hidden motives. Her descriptions of the streets and houses are as powerful as her character portraits and, often, one informs the other in a fluid exchange:
Engulfed in the hot stench of the city, he found that the boundary between his inner and outer selves seemed to dissolve. The fetid air seeped in through his pores and soiled what was inside, while his simmering emotions leaked out of his body into the streets.
If there is a common thread between the multiple actors in the novel, it must be something to do with alienation : from family, from nature, from society.
Though the faces and voices resembled her own, she was alone in a world where no one knew her. When she looked out the window again, the sun had set and she found herself staring at her own rflection in the dark glass: she saw a forlorn young woman in a dowdy coat looking back at her, and the sight filled her with a sense of utter isolation. [Anna]
Up until the very last page of the novel (possibly even after the last line) we will not know if any of the women will be able to escape their fate. Even Masako, the strongest of the group, is on the brink of succumbing to the absolute weariness of a futile struggle.
Still, she had no intention of apologising to anyone, no regrets about the way she'd handled things. The only thing that concerned her now was that someone was blocking her exit, and how she was going to get out. Even if she told the others what she was planning, she knew none of them would come with her; and she wasn't looking for company anyway.
Which brings me back to the title of the novel and to a classic song from The Animals:
In this dirty old part of the city
Where the sun refused to shine
People tell me, there ain't no use in tryin'
We gotta get out of this place!
If it's the last thing we ever do…
***** stars
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tw: rape, assault, violence
This is just my opinion, but I found "Out" to be poorly written and poorly constructed. Most characters and their reactions weren't credible at all, and the story completely lack of suspense or tension. It was more laughable than gripping.
Not my kind of book at all. I keep hesitating between 1 and 2 stars... I'm going to be generous and say "it was ok" and it was entertaining enough that I kept reading till the end.
This is just my opinion, but I found "Out" to be poorly written and poorly constructed. Most characters and their reactions weren't credible at all, and the story completely lack of suspense or tension. It was more laughable than gripping.
Not my kind of book at all. ...more
Popsugar 2020 Reading Challenge
A book set in Japan, the host of 2020 Olympics
A book set in a city that has hosted the olympics
(Tokyo, Japan in 1964).
I read this novel 13 years ago and now dropped it two stars down due to the uneven, rather repulsive ending and the slow moving pace of this "thriller". The story doesn't warrant 500 pages.
"You know," she murmured, "we're all heading straight to hell."
"Yes," said Masako, giving her a bleak look. "It's like riding downhill with no brakes."
"You mean, there's no way to stop?"
"No, you stop all right - when you crash."
Masak
A slow moving tale of misogyny and loneliness, that in the end disappointed meI read this novel 13 years ago and now dropped it two stars down due to the uneven, rather repulsive ending and the slow moving pace of this "thriller". The story doesn't warrant 500 pages.
"You know," she murmured, "we're all heading straight to hell."
"Yes," said Masako, giving her a bleak look. "It's like riding downhill with no brakes."
"You mean, there's no way to stop?"
"No, you stop all right - when you crash."
Masako (badass main character), Yoshi (older widow who takes care of her mother in law), Yayoi (pretty but been abused by her husband) and Kuniko (younger woman deep in debt) work in a lunch box packaging facility. They do the nightshift to earn some more, because part time jobs don't really earn all that much otherwise.
All people around the four main characters are damn right awful, including their family members.
The tale of poverty and loan sharks is a bleak one, especially combined with the seemingly universal misogyny, occurrences of domestic violence and even attempted rape.
Also the women, despite their heavy night shifts, still are universally expected to take care of domestic life. They are essentially all taken for granted by others, or try feebly to exert some power over others in response to how their environment treats them.
This is the background for Yayoi killing her husband, and this common thread of misery leads the others to help her in disposing the body. Naturally this has all kinds of ramifications, not least a sadistic gambler boss coming after the four women.
Around page 300 one of the character is musing, when inquired if she felt something changed inside her due to the help she gave with the dissecting of Kenji, that no, nothing changed, because she always seems to be expected to be responsible for all shitty jobs anyway.
You feel sorry for them (except Kuniko) and can understand how the desperate lack of money and agency leads them to their actions. That is what Natsuo Kirino does expertly, with some perspective on how immigrants are treated in homogenous Japan as and added social commentary that really still feels timeless and relevant today.
The language in Out feels effective at best, not really polished, but clearly communicates the dreary circumstances the characters find themselve in.
A device that comes back is that literally everyone constantly seems busy with smoking, constantly and everywhere, it's nowhere functional to the plot and started to feel as a filler.
The entire book feels very slow for a thriller in my opinion.
The ending, with a final explosion of violence (a twice depicted rape amongst other things) and a kind of weird Stockholm syndrome, really grated me.
Out is a book that has been on my TBR for eternity, it seems, and one I've even checked out from the library a couple of times only to return without
I began reading this book Saturday morning out on the deck along with a piping hot cup of Joe and what I call the "widowmaker" – maple/bacon donuts from The Donut King. I don't know if I really loved this as much as I think I did or if I was simply high from the sugar/Springtime combo. Whatever the case, I'm happy to report I was not a wrongreader.Out is a book that has been on my TBR for eternity, it seems, and one I've even checked out from the library a couple of times only to return without ever reading. You'd think it was due to the fear that all of my friends would break up with me and troll me for sucking turtles, but you would be wrong. Once I simply ran out of time because my eyes are always bigger than my stomach??? brain???? whatever sounds best when it comes to checking out too many books at once. The second time it was because this was only available in paperback and that font was effing killin' me old eyeholes. But per usual FOMO eventually won out and I just resigned myself to the fact that I would have a blistering headache come Sunday while I read this in one sitting.
The story here is about a group of women who have formed a less than friend, but more than acquaintance, type of relationship while all working the night shift at a factory that makes boxed lunches. When one of the gals finally gets fed up with her deadbeat husband after he takes his gambling and cheating to a new level and adds wife beating to the mix, she does what every self-respecting woman would do and kills him. *waves at husband in case he has ever been curious what would happen should he do this to me* The only thing left to do is dispose of the body. That's where the other gals come in and where the readers will find themselves saying . . . .
And if you're like me and my friends, also . . . .
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 . . . .
Pretty much like any time I've watched a subtitled film. However, when it comes to the content? Believe the hype. I can see why this has become such a cult classic.
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This is very atmospheric. It is definitely NOT for the faint of heart because as I mentioned before, quite gruesome and violent. Some reviewers mentioned they did not like the ending. I was fine with it.
I also have Real World by this author and I look forward to it.
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HOWEVER...
I may have thought it was amazing because I have lived in Japan for nearly three years and I felt like I could identify with the characters. I picked up on cultural subtleties that made me laugh and made me cringe. I rolled my eyes at Japanese women being Japanese women in the book and I cheered when they broke free from that mould - even though breaking free meant that they were ostracized from society and th
This book is full of amazingly WRONG situations and I thought it was amazing.HOWEVER...
I may have thought it was amazing because I have lived in Japan for nearly three years and I felt like I could identify with the characters. I picked up on cultural subtleties that made me laugh and made me cringe. I rolled my eyes at Japanese women being Japanese women in the book and I cheered when they broke free from that mould - even though breaking free meant that they were ostracized from society and thought of as weird.
If you decide to read this book, take everything in it with a grain of salt and try to imagine it from a Japanese point of view. It will completely alter the experience.
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After reading and feeling like REAL WORLD was a pretty mediocre book, I approached OUT with tempered expectations. The premise sounded fascinating though. OUT is about a group of Japanese women working in a lunch factory. One day, one of them kills her abusive husband and enlists her friends to help her to dispose of the body. What ensues is a dark and pretty twisted story that involves morbid descriptions of corpse disposal and involvem
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After reading and feeling like REAL WORLD was a pretty mediocre book, I approached OUT with tempered expectations. The premise sounded fascinating though. OUT is about a group of Japanese women working in a lunch factory. One day, one of them kills her abusive husband and enlists her friends to help her to dispose of the body. What ensues is a dark and pretty twisted story that involves morbid descriptions of corpse disposal and involvement from the yakuza.
I liked OUT a lot. I felt like it lost steam at the end, but 80% of the story kept me turning pages like nobody's business. I find Japan fascinating and I actually really liked the descriptions of the factory work and the lunches. The women were also all interesting in their own way, because I felt like each one embodied a woman at a various stage of womanhood and dissatisfaction. There's Masako, a middle-aged housewife with a shady history who is estranged from her husband and son. There's Yoshie, the single mother with two ill-behaved daughters and a mother-in-law she is indebted to. There's Kuniko, a spoiled and overweight young woman who struggles with body image and her desire for material things. And then there's Yayoi, a woman who embodies the ideal of the "perfect wife" to no avail.
I'm surprised that the ratings for this book are so low. I've read about three of Kirino's books at this point and I feel like this is the best because it shows the sexism and frustration that arise from the so-called traditional gender roles, and what happens when women get sick of fitting into those cramped little boxes and decide to break free in a truly graphic and unconventional way. None of these women were likable, which is maybe why so many struggled to finish, but I found them all interesting and relatable, and I appreciated the feminist social commentary through the dark thriller lens.
If you enjoy female-centric thrillers with antiheroines and shocking moments of horror, I think you'll like OUT. Just be prepared for it to fizzle a little at the end.
3.5 stars
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Honestly this could have been such a good book. It could have been a sort of "vengeance thriller" of women who have been humiliated and ignored all their lives just because they were women, taking
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.
Honestly this could have been such a good book. It could have been a sort of "vengeance thriller" of women who have been humiliated and ignored all their lives just because they were women, taking out the men who did them wrong one by one. There's a market for, as the neckbeards say, "misandry".
It really goes off the rails, though. It's like along the way major plotpoints were dropped (who was the parking lot pervert? does the police close the Kenji murder case? etc) and the book just turns into rape-filled torture-porn. The guy who accidentally got blamed for Kenji's murder decides he's going to find out who actually killed the guy (interesting development) but then literally forgets all about it and decides he's going to stalk, torture, rape and kill one the women instead. What????? It's like the author was writing one book and then two-thirds of the way was like "ahhh fuck it. This is boring. I want to write about a serial killer instead" but didn't want to discard what she had written so she ended up with a Frankenstein of a story.
The stalkers, domestic abusers, rapists, killers, etc, all get justifications from the women themselves and from the author's narration. They get forgiveness, they get acceptance. It's disgusting. Meanwhile the self-defense killing of Kenji gets a lot of condemnation from all sides. There is also a LOT of rape-as-sexual-fantasy here. Two of the four protagonists have rape fantasies, one is even shown to enjoy her own rape.
There are lots of things wrong with this book. What about the portrayal of the Brazilian character, Kazuo?
Dekasseguis are Brazilians who are descendants from Japanese immigrants and who went to work in Japan after the "Lost Decade" of the 80s. It is known that dekasseguis face a lot of prejudice and discrimination in Japan, so the fact that the characters would treat the Brazilian workers at their factory as inferior doesn't feel unrealistic. It is a problem, however, when the author's writing reflects this prejudice.
When there is rumour of a sex offender attacking women on the way to work, the characters immediately are like "must be a Brazilian". Ok. But then later, a Brazilian man, a dekassegui of mixed race, Kazuo, does attack Masako, one of the protagonists. So when a wave of sex crimes start, you blame the latinos, and it turns out the characters weren't being prejudiced, they were right, the pervert is the latino, and one of black ancestry at that. Do you see anything wrong with that??
(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.)
The fact is that the author chose to make the Brazilian character an attempted rapist, described him as having "darkish skin, caved-in face and protuding forehead" and "thick legs" (does that description remind you of anything??) and had his room smell of a "foreign spice that [Masako] couldn't identify" is extremely disturbing.
For the record, excepting in the state of Bahia (where Kazuo isn't from), Brazilian food isn't even spicy. Is garlic considered an exotic spice now??? Onions?? Salt?? For fuck's sake. But we're latinos, right. So we must smell of spices.
Holy shit, and what about the extremely lazy way the Portuguese language was handled? Now, I don't know if the author is to blame for this, but the translator definitely is, and CERTAINLY the asshole who "edited" this.
The capital of the state of São Paulo is São Paulo. NOT "Sao Paolo". That's not even real language. It's like "Nee Yorck". Don't even get me started on "fejioda". It's FEIJOADA. I don't even know what the fuck "shoro" was meant to be. Churrasco? Churros? Chouriço? I mean fuck. You couldn't open a map to see how to spell São Paulo? Couldn't google some Brazilian dishes??? "Oh what's that thing with beans they eat? Fiajada? Fijida? Oh I know. Fejioda. Nailed it". WHO PROOF READ THIS????
These four unassuming women are the heroines of Natsuo Kirino's novel OUT, wi
Masako Katori; Kuniko Jonouchi; Yoshie Azuma; Yayoi Yamamoto; who are these normal people? Well, they all work the night shift at the local boxed-lunch factory. From midnight until 6 a.m. every 'day' they prepare these meals for the office workers and commuters of downtown Tokyo. It's not much of a life but they work well as a team and they always snatch the best part of the conveyor belt; the easiest jobs, if you will.These four unassuming women are the heroines of Natsuo Kirino's novel OUT, winner of Japan's top mystery prize and a 300,000 copies bestseller.
When you first begin reading this 500 page book, it seems a little slow - telling the tale of the charmless lives of these industrial monkeys as they fill their hours chucking ingredients into boxed lunches. They're an odd assortment of ages, these women, from an odd assortment of social and family backgrounds.
Masako's teenage son hasn't spoken to her in a year, neither has her husband. Kuniko is so far in debt, yet lives a life of apparent luxury. Yoshie has her ailing grandmother at home, nothing more than a cantankerous and grotesquely smelling baby. Yayoi has just killed her husband on the doorstep of their family home...
Yayoi Yamamoto panics and phones her work colleague Masako Katori and asks if she'll help dispose of the body. To her surprise (and eternal gratitude) Masako says, "No problem."
This is a weird book. You're happily thrumming along in the slow lane of its detailed domestic narrative and then someone throws a house brick onto your windscreen from a passing bridge. You swerve to regain control of the car but something's changed. You're no longer driving the same car. This feeling of metamorphosis continues to haunt the rest of the book and you're never certain what will happen next to whom and why. Yeah, I know that's the aim of most mystery-thriller books but this baby goes much deeper into the human psyche than it needs.
It's not just that there's a murder and there's a mystery involved. In fact, there's not much of a mystery involved. We know who did the murder and we know who's helping dispose of the body, all Yayoi's four most trusted work colleagues. 'Most trusted' might not be the right phrase - each of the four girls has a motive outside the purely charitable and this adds to the tension of will-they won't-they be found out.
Remember the way Columbo use to work? He'd be dogged like a pugnacious fox terrier never letting go of his suspect, grinding out every ounce of patience from his poor victims. Well, the two cops who arrive to investigate aren't in Columbo's league and they shouldn't be. This is a more down to earth story where the police don't always get their man. But the feeling you get from the book is of that absolute unending torture that Columbo brought with him. From before the first half of the book it is excruciatingly nerve-wracking.
The star of the book isn't the story or the characterisation, though the murder and Masako's helping dispose of the body are the focus of the narrative, it is the depth of motivation of each of the seven or so main characters that stands out. There's the seemingly above-board hostess club owner Satake, the flamboyantly-named debt collector Jumonji and the Brazilian immigrant worker Kazuo. You feel these people are really living and breathing in the swirling narrative as they batter like mad against the waves to keep their heads above water. Even the four girls have their own stories to tell while the real story chunters on beside them. It's a great complex read.
It's a sometimes gory book with dismemberment, rape and torture. The depiction of the weight of a dismembered human body and the problems of getting rid of how ever many doubled plastic bin liners worth of human garbage is especially well depicted.
The prolonged build up just piles on mental torture upon death threats and theatrical getaways. The final showdown itself is well worth the wait and you'll be gasping for breath long before you've realised how it's going to end. It sure is a strange ending for this genre of novel. Some might call it a down beat ending but that has never bothered this reviewer and because it has the guts of its conviction right up to the end
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Masako enlists the help of the trusted fifty-something Yoshie, whom she knows is in desperate need of money from caring for her bedridden mother-in-law. But while the two are butchering their first ever dead body in Masako's bathroom, the fourth friend in their factory clique gets a peek through the window, and Kuniko is enlisted to help with the disposal of the pieces with an offer of money to keep her from blabbing. The body bags have been divided into thirds, and are to be disposed of in different locations all over town. But the sloppy, lazy Kuniko's bags are easily uncovered and identified, and soon the police show up asking questions. But the police are the least of their worries.
Satake, a calculating nightclub owner and pimp who has his own experience with dead bodies, is arrested for the murder. He is released because of lack of evidence, but he makes finding the killer of this man who stalked one of his girls priority one when he hits the streets. And he has a hunch about where to start looking first: at Kenji's wife, Yayoi.
Out is one of those delicious domino-effect thrillers in the vein of Scott Smith's A Simple Plan, where a character's action leads to an undesirable result, which must be dealt with by an even less sensible and more desperate action, and so on and so on and so on. Out is also a statement about Japan's patriarchal society and the mistreatment of female office and factory workers, and the few options they have for escaping their dreary, tired lives.
Body pieces that won't stay buried; a wedding band that won't stay thrown away; a hidden key that won't stay submerged; children who know more than should; a loan shark with a tempting but messy business offer; a tenacious detective; and a man and woman who discover after it's too late that they are more alike than they could ever imagine are the things that make Out the perfect page turner—or button clicker if you own an eReader.
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Out is not that. Out is not even on the same planet as that, and yet it grabbed me by the shoulders and shook, hard, unt
When I caught the words "hard-boiled" on this book's back cover before reading it, can't lie: I was less than enthused. During my embarrassingly long mystery-novel obsession, I've pinpointed my favorite kind quite precisely – cerebral social comedies, preferably written by British women between 1915 and ~1965, with levels of gore not to exceed your occasional poisoned crumpet.Out is not that. Out is not even on the same planet as that, and yet it grabbed me by the shoulders and shook, hard, until I tore through it all. And liked it.
Given that we find nine X chromosomes distributed among its five main characters, this isn't your typical fedoraed American noir either. I mean, this book passes the Bechdel Test, plants a grubby sneaker on the throat of patriarchy, twirls its machete, then comes back for more. It skewers gender inequity, and turns its blades on Japanese ageism and racism for good measure.
Like other hard-boiled crime books, this one is set in all that stuff seething on the edges of a stultifying society. But unlike a lot of those rye-swilling, laconic loner detectives, the decent of these characters into the mire is depicted in agonizingly deep, multi-perspective detail. In fact, most of the mysteriousness of this novel is psychological: will they buy into or opt out of the grim social structures around them? How can they? And what in the hell will their tortured minds lead them to do next?
Right. And about that torture: the violence in this book does tend toward the ridiculously over-the-top, nightmare-making kind. Not my usual cup of (view spoiler)[arsenic-laced (hide spoiler)] tea, let me tell you. What often bugs me about noir-mystery gore, though, is that, rather than coming off as symptomatic of a rotten society, it just seems kind of gratuitous. But here, the carnage is the story. It's part of a seamless whole and full of significant, meaty symbolism (oh, how very meaty it is.). Entertaining? Ugh. Not so much.
My biggest bento-box beef with the book was that the integration of the multiple perspectives was occasionally a bit clunky, especially when Kirino hit rewind and replayed the same scene from another point of view. But a very minor beef, this one.
I will be reading more Kirino, for sure. This book is gray, gritty, mad, raw and suffused with the kind of black humor that'll turn your smile right upside-down. And maybe, with its socially aware black comedy and its unabashedly female perspective, it might inhabit the same planet as my other beloved mysteries after all.
They probably should not have tea with each other, though. I don't want to clean up the mess.
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After completing her law degree, Kirino worked in various fields before becoming a fictional writer; including scheduling and organizing films to be shown in a movie theater, and working as an editor and writer for a magazine publication. She got married to her present husband when she turned twenty-four, and began writing professionally, after giving birth to her daughter, at age thirty. However, it was not until Kirino was forty-one that she made her major debut. Since then, she has written thirteen full-length novels and three volumes of collective short stories, which are highly acclaimed for her intriguingly intelligent plot development and character portrayal, and her unique perspective of Japanese society after the collapse of the economic bubble.
Today, Kirino continues to enthusiastically write in a range of interesting genres. Her smash hit novel OUT (Kodansha, 1997) became the first work to be translated into English and other languages. OUT was also nominated for the 2004 MWA Edgar Allan Poe Award in the Best Novel Category, which made Kirino the first Japanese writer to be nominated for this major literary award. Her other works are now under way to be translated and published around the world.
...moreNews & Interviews
"Yes," said Masako, giving her a bleak look. "It's like riding downhill with no brakes."
"You mean, there's no way to stop?"
"No, you stop all right - when you crash."
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