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.


Dark and highly inventive thriller   May 3, 2004
 49 out of 67 found this review helpful

Having read my way through the currently available translations of the Japanese classics of the mystery genre I came across Kirino's "Out": a dark, but very satisfying surprise.

Women in Japan follow their European and American sisters still more than a few steps behind. Despite the rosy picture some books and movies try to paint, the land of the rising sun is still very much a man's world. Moreover, acts like openly studying hard core porn while surrounded by female fellow subway travelers is still very much accepted Japanese male behavior.

This kind of atmosphere pervades Kirino's "sisters are doing it (mostly) by themselves mystery", which visits the darker back alleys of Japanese life and of mankind and its motives in general.

In a truly virtuoso performance featuring a cast a wonderful three dimensional characters and their interactions that have the authentic "stranger than fiction" quality the writer takes us on a highly energetic and stimulating rollercoaster ride. While the reader at no moment gets bothered by any even veiled intellectualisms it is clear how well Kirino is versed in classical (Japanese) mystery writing, in existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre, feminists like de Beauvoir and Greere and students of the twisted mind like Freud and de Sade.

All this knowledge gets combined with a superb sense of pacing and amazing sense of finding new "counterpoint" between its characters. The result is a dense 300+ page turner, that at times is disturbingly dark and gruesome, but represents a truly transcendental classic of modern mystery writing.


The translation is way too interpretive   September 22, 2005
 20 out of 22 found this review helpful

having read this book in the original Japanese, i was curious about the translation. some called it bland while others said it was "excellent" and even Amazon's own reviewer calls it "unobtrusive". well, it does not appear that any of these opinions were rendered by people who could compare it to the original so perhaps my two cents here will not be a total waste.
in my opinion, the English translation of "Out" is a work unto itself. i wouldn't even call it a translation; more like an "interpretation". many things which are stated in Japanese are not stated in English. i mean things like, you know, nouns, verbs, adjectives, perhaps entire sentences... it's not like these are subtle nuances.
i think this was deliberate on the part of the translator, whose obvious aim was to create a very smooth, readable product in English. i think he has succeeded in that respect. i think the publisher's marketing arm should be quite happy with its unobtrusiveness.

however, i'm not so sure that i agree with that approach to translation. maybe if you're translating poetry or something whacked out like Finnegan's Wake, you have no choice but to take some serious poetic license. but geez, this is a novel. there is a lot of descriptive language--Kirino's Japanese is much more challenging than, say, Murakami Haruki (himself a translator) or Suzuki Koji (he of The Ring fame). so, i agree that it would not be easy to do a straight-up translation and make it seem like it was originally written in English. but to me, that's half the fun. why do we need to pretend it needs to sound like it was written in English to begin with? if there are subtleties (grammatical, cultural, etc.) which are too convoluted to convey in a normal English sentence, would it really hurt the book's sales figures that much to throw in a footnote or two? perhaps endnotes if that is asking too much?

in recent years works by the likes of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Natsume Soseki have been retranslated because the old standbys were overly interpretive and people reading the translations actually wanted to know what these guys were saying. obviously something is always lost in the translation; i just don't think it has to be this much.


Out To Lunch   July 16, 2007
 18 out of 24 found this review helpful

The canons of literature have their fair share of dark and dismal books full of dark and dismal people. And if there's anything that can be said of most writers, it's that they tend to be moody people. A book like "Out," in which a woman murders her philandering husband and then gets her coworkers to help her dispose of the body, is not exactly the dreariest thing I've ever read, but it comes close to being one of the most tedious.

After Yayoi strangles the drunken and stumbling Kenji, she turns for help to Masako, one of her closest friends at the factory where they work. Masako enlists the help of Kuniko and Yoshie, and together they chop up the body and throw it out with the trash. According to the back of the book, this "leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society."

Really? No, it doesn't. First of all, "terrifying?" I'm going to avoid talking about the writing; there's a good chance that the repetitive and pedestrian prose is the result of bad translating, and there's an even better chance that its lackluster droning is meant to sound hard-boiled instead of just half-baked. Whatever you want to call it (uninspired, trite, monotonous), even if it is by no means "terrifying," at least it moves pretty fast.

But where does it take us?

Maybe it wants to show us a war of the sexes. It's pretty much women versus men in this book, with almost every man being a lying, manipulative, violent jerk. And the men who don't fit that description are sullen, impotent nobodies. Masako, the closest thing this book has to a main character, is married to a man who treats his entire life like it's an embarassing rash that he doesn't want to deal with. Her son is a petulant spectre who is so bummed by life that he lives under a vow of silence (although he breaks his vow just long enough to tell Masako what a horrible mom she is). Masako is stalked and almost raped by Kazuo, a Brazilian coworker who, believe it or not, is set up as one of the book's very very very few sympathetic characters.

I don't mind the allegory of gender warfare, and I'm certainly not one to talk about the rights of women, especially those in Japan, but I do wonder why Kirino made her female characters as despicable as the men. Kuniko is a fat, selfish slob. Yayoi kills her own husband but still comes across as weak and whiny. Yoshie is ridiculously put-upon by her vile and demanding mother-in-law and daughters; her tolerance at the hands of their abuse is hard to understand, given that she has the spine to chop up a dead body and bike the bloody parts all over town.

Even Masako, the centerpiece, the ring leader, the cool and detached figurehead, even she seems to be hardly anything at all. Kirino, perhaps afraid that the book's darker corners would make little narrative sense, goes on and on for many pages about why the characters do the things they do. Instead of creating realistic portraits and then letting them move around, Kirino feels compelled to explain them to us, over and over. Even the novel's climactic scene is told twice, from the perspective of two different characters. That's not a bad idea if you're planning on revealing new details with each telling; in this case, it just reads like the publisher accidentally printed the ending twice.

It's a fitting end to a book that meanders without rhyme or reason between characters without virtues or validity, to a story that leaves dozens of boring loose-ends hanging in the wind, to a novel that is too busy analyzing ad nauseum the ways and whys of its world to actually show us something interesting. There's only one thing I connected with when I read this book. Every character, in some form or another, is searching for a way "out" of the novel's dark, pessimistic world.

I knew exactly how they felt.


A Riveting Look at the Japanese Dark Side   December 30, 2004
 16 out of 16 found this review helpful

As Edgar Allen Poe and Rod Serling both demonstrated, the best horror stories take place in the most mundane settings, involving the most ordinary people. Natsuo Kirino's OUT brilliantly follows this dictum, presenting a chilling tale of murder and dismemberment under the most ordinary of circumstances. The result is a gripping page-turner that turns victimizers into victims and ultimately probes the darkest corners of the Japanese psyche.

OUT begins with four typical Japanese women who work the night shift together at a box lunch factory. Masako Katori is a middle-aged, former office worker locked into a loveless marriage to a self-isolating husband and an intentionally mute teenage son. Yoshie Azuma is a widow in her late fifties, burdened with the care of an incontinent mother-in-law and two self-centered daughters. Kuniko Jonouchi is an overweight and materialistic young woman whose live-in "husband" has just abandoned her and her small mountain of credit debt. Yayoi Yamamoto is a pretty young mother of two children and wife to a gambling, skirt-chasing husband who has blown their life savings at the baccarat tables of a club owned by Mitsuyoushi Satake, a small-time hood with a horrifying secret past.

It is Yayoi who triggers events by strangling her husband in a fit of rage. Realizing what she has done, she calls Masako for help, and they jointly decide to hide the murder and get rid of the body. Their solution eventually sucks Yoshie and Kuniko into their plot, and Satake is fingered by the police as the most likely killer of Yayoi's husband. Satake loses both of his clubs as a consequence and sets out on a course of revenge. The four women's lives head into a free falling death spiral as they are unwittingly drawn into one another's lives and into the yakuza underworld. Desperation leads them to more and more shocking actions, resulting in two of their deaths and a chilling battle of wits, culminating in a sado-masochistic climax.

Kirino's writing is serviceable for this type of book, not rich in imagery or description but well-paced, focusing on actions and character motivations. She maintains her characters' sense of desperation and builds her story to a suspenseful climax, leaving the reader guessing how her main characters will respond to events. Kirino is most successful in tracing Masako's discovery of hidden strengths as well as her descent into horrifying depravity. We identify with Masako, leaving us wondering just how dark might be the deepest corners of our own souls.

OUT struck me as a particularly Japanese novel, following that culture's peculiar fascination with ritualistic murder and masochistic infliction of pain evidenced by writers like Mishima, movies like IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, and even the recent spate of pop horror movies like THE RING. America's dark side tends toward mass murderers and serial killers, most of whom are regarded as social misfits or freaks (such as Jeffrey Dahmer, or Hannibal Lechter). The power of Kirino's OUT lies in the very ordinariness of its four female protagonists.

I bought OUT as an airplane read before an 18-hour flight; it proved to be an excellent choice for some badly needed escapism. I am hardly an expert on crime novels, but I recommend this book highly as a good read and a bleak look at the underside of modern Japanese life and culture.