Out: Natsuo Kirino

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I felt like the author was really getting her rocks off with this ridiculous and horrible rape-fetish ending. 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. Yayoi explains to a policeman that she tries to get a little sleep after her night shifts while her young children are in daycare. 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. 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.

Copeland, "Woman Uncovered: Pornography and Power in the Detective Fiction of Kirino Natsuo", Japan Forum 16/2 (2004): 249–69. Crónica social de un Japón donde la clase trabajadora lo tiene negro, donde la mujer se tiene que abrir camino a base de codazos y dónde la violencia es descarnada, fria y casi rutinaria, es también una novela con un nivel de lirismo apabullantes en personajes como los de Kazuo, Satake o Masako. 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. 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). 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.Not wanting the incident to come to light, she seeks help from her friend Masako to get rid of the body.

This is a diluted, sentimentalised, scrubbed up version of the novel that comes across as a made- for-TV Tuesday night filler. There are two major secondary characters in Out: Anna, who loves Satake, and Kazuo, the Brazilian factory worker infatuated with Masako. The reality of the chokehold of harsh domesticity that places exacting demands on them while sparing the men of the house. So there was a steady and consistent depiction of the anomie within Japanese society, particularly for those who resided in high-cost Tokyo. 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.On entering her house, Yayoi is "struck by the familiar smell of home, like the scent of a puppy sleeping in the sun". 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. Masako Katori is a bit of a puzzle to her workmates as they all believe that she could easily find employment with greater prestige.

All his convoluted thought processes are so lucidly explicated that one cannot help fathoming a perverse kind of logic in them. 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.In what ways is the choice a reaction to her experiences in her previous job at an upscale credit and loan company? Kirino's answer, insofar as she offers one, is more disturbing than the actual event: they do not know what else to do, and are getting back at an unfair world. 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. The proposition that a body could be shifted around as easily as this, defying the curiosity of neighbours and the suspicions of the police, is far-fetched. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work.

Yayoi had been deeply in love when she married the attractive, attentive Kenji, but his careless cruelty and reckless gambling have left her angry and embittered. For Out, she visited a pathology autopsy class at a university but was not able to view a real corpse.There is even a suggestion that the stultifying dullness of their lives has somehow anaesthetised them. 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. 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. 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. Ahora a ver si las editoriales se ponen las pilas y alguna compra los derechos de esta maravillosa autora, que tiene casi una treintena de libros publicados en Japón y en España solo tiene TRES, y ya no me queda nada por leer y quiero más =(.