Out by Natsuo Kirino Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $9.95 You Save: $13.00 (57%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.36 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Out
Book Review: Japanese lit joins the real world
Summary: 4 Stars
First published in Japan in 1998, this psychological thriller won the Naoki Prize, a major literary award. (She was also nominated for the Edgar in 2004.) What amazes me is that none of the reviews I've read mentioned the book's thoroughly Hitchcockian atmosphere and plot development. You can see things coming that make you wince in anticipation. And you sometimes want to yell at the characters -- especially the selfish, self-centered Kuniko -- "Don't be stupid! Don't do it!" (Can't wait for the movie!) Kirino, who used to work as a club hostess herself, reveals a desperate, gritty world of female night-shift workers and gambling clubs and small-time hoods, none of which are the slightest bit romanticized. Families won't speak to each other, husbands drink to submerge their depression, women drown in their own desperation. And Yayoi, a young, beautiful wife and mother, passes the last point of patience and strangles her womanizing husband who has thrown away their life savings. She turns for help to Masako, strongest of four friends on the night shift at a boxed lunch factory, and after that there's no turning back for any of them. These are not the quiet, giggling childlike women that writers like Kawabata and Mishima insist are unique to Japan; they're real people not subject to traditional sentimental male values and prejudices, and they have far more in common with ordinary women in other cultures than Westerners would have thought. And Kirino's willingness to say so has had a groundbreaking effect on Japanese literature generally. But this is not to slight her other characters, especially Jumonji, the on-the-make loan shark who wants to recruit Masako as a business partner, and Satake, the disturbingly bent ex-con who has killed for love -- sort of. In fact, the only thing wrong with this book is the rather flat, uninspired translation, but even that won't keep this story from gripping you by the throat.Book Review: Just an old trick
Summary: 2 Stars
The book is well-translated but the story is predictably boring.It's so obvious to me that the author is just trying to shock the readers by writing something unusually gruesome. This is just an old trick. Come on! Can you be a little more
original?
A bunch of housewives getting together to kill someone and writing about them in gory detail is not creative. This is a novel for beginners.
Book Review: Lunchboxes and Dismemberment
Summary: 5 Stars
"Out" by Natsuo Kirino is certainly not my usual choice in reading material, though one I was thoroughly glad to have decided upon reading. I thoroughly enjoyed every last page of it, from beginning to end.
Masako, Kuniko, Yoshie and Yayoi are a group of women who work nights at a boxed lunch factory in Tokyo. After Yayoi strangles her husband, the others attempt to cover up the crime. Along with a host of other characters who get pulled into the plot, these women find themselves in some rather unusual situations.
The characterisations of each is in-depth and gritty. The women each have a host of problems with their own lives, let alone getting hooked up in covering for Yayoi. From issues with family life, money and their own children, these women are real, earthy and very flawed heroines. However, they are also very real, and very human people with their own idiosyncracies.
The world about the women often treats women as mere objects, and this comes out in people like loan shark Jumonji, with a taste for high school girls, and the pimp Satake, whose only real love was someone he knifed to death. Within this world of oppressive objectification, the four women from the factory stand in stark contrast to this overall trend.
"Out" is a crime novel, but it is also so much more. Despite the problems some have mentioned about it, I did not find them such an issue. For a good story about a murder and its cover up, you will not find much better. It is a great book, and one that I will remember for a long time to come.
Book Review: Morbidly Fascinating
Summary: 3 Stars
Out, to which I was originally drawn because I wanted to learn more about everyday life in Japan through the eyes of one of that country's best novelists, is my first real experience with modern Japanese fiction. Since I am also a fan of hardboiled detective fiction, I actually had two reasons for getting hold of a copy of Natsuo Kirino's prize winning novel. But in reality, this is no detective novel; it can, in fact, be more accurately described as a crime thriller and, because of its gritty setting, dark plot and tough characters, a perfect representation of Japanese noir.
Natsuo Kirino has written a story about a segment of Japan's underclass that is rarely discussed by outsiders, an underclass that has everything in common with its equivalent in this country: people who work full-time jobs for such low wages that they can barely get by from one paycheck to the next. As their desperation grows over time, some in that predicament discover that the everyday struggle for survival has turned them into people they hardly recognize, people willing to do just about anything that gives them a chance to get a little bit ahead in the struggle to carve out a decent life for themselves.
The four women who work as an unofficial team during the overnight shift at a box lunch factory because it pays a few pennies more per hour than the earlier shifts can feel their lives slipping away from them. For a variety of reasons, each has come to prefer the solitary lifestyle demanded of those who return home just in time every morning to see everyone around them leave for their own day's work. Yoshie, the sole support of an invalid mother-in-law and unappreciative teenage daughter, feels trapped in a situation she can barely afford to sustain. Masako has a husband whose life is so separate from hers that she only sees him at mealtimes and a teenage son who despises her, and she has come to appreciate the way that her night shift allows her to avoid both. Kumiko, youngest of the four, lives only to shop and has gotten so far into debt that she feels physically threatened by bill collectors. And Yayoi has two small boys and a husband who squanders the family earnings on his gambling addiction and the women who work the clubs he frequents.
Of the four, it is Yayoi who cracks first. The almost casual way that her husband discloses to her one evening that he has gambled away all of their savings throws her into such a rage that she finds the strength to strangle him to death. Desperate to cover up what she has done, Yayoi seeks help from Masako, the one person she trusts to keep her secret. The two hatch a scheme to dispose of the body by cutting it into pieces and placing the pieces in garbage cans around the city, a solution that requires the help of Yoshie and Kumiko if it is to have any chance of success.
Tension mounts when enough of the body is discovered to allow its identification and the police begin to suspect that Yayoi may be involved in the murder of her husband. But it is when the group's weakest link decides to cash in on what she knows about the murder that things really begin to come apart for the women; soon all four are forced to scramble not only to keep their freedom, but to stay alive.
Out is one bloody and gruesome novel. It is filled with brutality, despair, greed and sadism and I can actually only recall one genuinely likeable character in the entire novel, someone I never expected I would grow to admire, a Brazilian/Japanese citizen in Japan to work in the country of his father. It is perhaps somewhat of a feminist novel but only in the sense that the author portrays these women, still very much second class citizens in their culture, as being capable of the same extremes and callous behavior displayed by the worst men in their lives. This is true equality, I suppose.
All four of these women were looking for a way out of their hopeless circumstances. They got more than they bargained for.
Out is an interesting novel, to say the least, but some readers may find its tone and content hard to take for 359 pages. It has certainly given me a view of Japan that I had not considered before, an impression that will haunt me for a good while. I can't say that I enjoyed this book but I have to admit that I found it morbidly fascinating.
Book Review: Night shift noir
Summary: 5 Stars
Masako, Yayoi, Yoshie, and Kumiko work the night shift at a boxed lunch factory in a characterless Tokyo suburb. Each has her reason for working at night and earning a little extra money: Masako's husband and son have grown so distant that she finds it less painful to be away from them as much as possible. Yayoi has small children and a spendthrift husband. Widowed Yoshie cares for an invalid mother-in-law and a teen daughter in the throes of rebellion, and young Kumiko`s taste for luxury has put her deep in debt. They are ordinary women living in a dull suburb with boring jobs and dead-end lives who manage to find the gallows humor in their situation.. Yet before Out is over, one of them will have murdered her husband, two will embark on a sickening business venture, and one will be dead. Author Natsuo Kirino won Japan's top mystery award for this novel, which smashes the perception of Japan as a society of either anal, work-focused drones or trendy Ginza teens. These women live surprisingly close to the underworld, and they find that violence and seedy glamour are closer than they think. "Out" is dark, violent, and psychologically astute--the very definition of noir. This is Kirino's first book to appear in English, and apparently her other award-winner will be published in English soon. This novel is highly recommended for readers who like to explore the dark side of a different culture.