Natsuo Kirino's "Out" . Translated by Stephen Snyder.



Photo from amazon.co.uk (beautiful binding from Virgin books) and text from amazon.com.
Four women who work the night shift in a Tokyo factory that produces boxed lunches find their lives twisted beyond repair in this grimly compelling crime novel, which won Japan's top mystery award, the Grand Prix, for its already heralded author, now making her first appearance in English.

Despite the female bonding, this dark, violent novel is more evocative of Gogol or Dostoyevsky than Thelma and Louise.

When Yayoi, the youngest and prettiest of the women, strangles her philandering gambler husband with his own belt in an explosion of rage, she turns instinctively for help to her co-worker Masako, an older and wiser woman whose own family life has fallen apart in less dramatic fashion.
To help her cut up and get rid of the dead body, Masako recruits Yoshie and Kuniko, two fellow factory workers caught up in other kinds of domestic traps.

In Snyder's smoothly unobtrusive translation, all of Kirino's characters are touching and believable. And even when the action stretches to include a slick loan shark from Masako's previous life and a pathetically lost and lonely man of mixed Japanese and Brazilian parentage, the gritty realism of everyday existence in the underbelly of Japan's consumer society comes across with pungent force.

Nothing in the sometimes hazy history of Japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirino's award-winning mystery OUT, a work that took the Japanese literary scene by storm and continues to haunt the popular consciousness as a recently released major motion picture.
Kirino's novel tells a story of random violence in the staid Tokyo Suburbs, as a young mother who works a night shift making boxed lunches brutally strangles her dead-beat husband and then seeks the help of her co-workers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime.

The ringleader of this cover-up, Masako Katori, emerges as the emotional heart of OUT and as one of the shrewdest, most clear-eyed creations in recent fiction. Masako's own search for a way OUT of the straitjacket of a dead-end life leads her, too, to take drastic action.

The complex yet riveting narrative seamlessly combines a convincing glimpse into the grimy world of Japan's yakuza with a brilliant portrayal of the psychology of a violent crime and the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse between seasoned detectives and a group of determined but inexperienced criminals. Kirino has mastered a "Thelma and Louise" kind of graveyard humor that illuminates her stunning evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds and the friendship that bolsters them in the aftermath.

OUT shows its author to be Japan's finest mystery writer as well as one of the most astute observers of contemporary society, revealing, in the course of its gripping pages, the fears, hopes, and obsessions that drive a complex country.

Seriously; this book is amazing. The pace Kirino sets, taking her time without ever getting boring, is something most writers can only dream of.

Most bookstores will have this in their crime/thriller section, but in that section it is a lone standout as the plot might make it a thriller, the writing is of such quality it is more than just that...

My best book of 2004/2005, even though it was written in 1997 and translated into English in 2003.

This book ROCKS!

ok

Yes I will..

Great, this is going to be book #5 that I'm going to be reading.


Miguel