Out: Natsuo Kirino

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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. 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 . . . . 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. Condannate a una vita in secondo piano, rinchiuse negli ambienti domestici, incatenate alla cura dei familiari, dipendenti dal denaro di un padre o di un marito, instupidite da giornate sempre uguali, e alla fine spente come lumicini dimenticati nei cimiteri o perse in giostrine di inutili cattiverie o scivolate nell’abisso della follia. I did not care for the initial police investigation. One of the detectives connected some dots that would have been a stretch with the information that he had at the time.

a b c d Poole, Stephen (26 November 2004). "Murder Sushi Wrote". The Guardian . Retrieved 12 December 2013.

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She seems to think we're guiltier than she is -- even though she's the one who killed her husband." Gurotesuku (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2003); English translation by Rebecca L. Copeland as Grotesque (New York: Knopf, 2007) 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:

a b c d Davis, J. Madison (January–February 2010). "Unimaginable Things: The Feminist Noir of Natsuo Kirino". World Literature Today. 84 (1): 9–11. Cuando un día Yayoi se presente en la fábrica con un "gran problema" entre manos, las otras tres no dudaran en ayudarla, aunque no todas lo harán desinterasadamente . Las cuatro comparten algo:una vida anodina e injusta de la que quieren escapar. Masako Katori is a bit of a puzzle to her workmates as they all believe that she could easily find employment with greater prestige.Masako and Yayoi discuss getting rid of the body in a calm, collected manner [pp. 49–55]. Why do you think the author chose this tone? What impact does it have on the reader? Does it distance you from the characters—or subtly draw you into the conspiracy?