A gutsy, unflinching foray into the darkest, most dangerous recesses of the human soul. And the book’s riveting, hair-raising final scenes, although definitely not for the faint-at-heart, serve as an unsettling reminder that the desperate desire for freedom has the potential to set any ordinary individual among us off down a very dark and lonely road.”– Minneapolis Star-Tribune The stalkers, domestic abusers, rapists, killers, etc, all get justifications from the women themselves and from the author's narration. They get forgiveness, they get acceptance. It's disgusting. Meanwhile the self-defense killing of Kenji gets a lot of condemnation from all sides. There is also a LOT of rape-as-sexual-fantasy here. Two of the four protagonists have rape fantasies, one is even shown to enjoy her own rape.

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 . . . . 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. Kirino's works, such as Out, ask the reader what they would do if something awful happened to them. [4] By writing novels that people can relate to, Kirino hopes her novels can help her readers through hard times and be comforted. [4] She has apparently been successful in reaching readers emotionally; for example Kirino was approached by a woman who thanked her for the liberation she felt after reading Out. [4]

Success!

OUT is a psychologically taut and unflinching foray into the darkest recesses of the human soul, an unsettling reminder that the desperate desire for freedom can make the most ordinary person do the unimaginable.

A battered woman murders her husband. Three of her work friends help her dispose of the body, forming a sort of makeshift "girl"-gang of 30-to-60-year-olds. As they try to deal with the police, loansharks and other complications, they each discover a darker side to themselves than they knew before. Kuniko, for example, is tied to her work at the Bento factory because she sees herself as ‘ugly and fat’, meaning she’d struggle to find a more glamorous job. And by glamourous, I mean working as a secretary or as a bank clerk. Concluding the MysteryScarily omniscient. . . . Like Walter Mosley, [Kirino] exploits the beat-down potential of the hard-boiled novel to depict life on society’s bottom in ways that subtly read as one part social protest, one part sadomasochistic entertainment.” –The Village Voice 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.

The book stars four women who work the night shift at a boxed dinner processing plant. Each has troubles at home, but after Yayoi’s husband, Kenji, comes home and says he’s gambled their life savings away, she’s fed up and 💀 him on the spot. 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. 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.ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE‘S 100BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME •Winner of Japan’s Grand Prix for Crime Fiction• Edgar Award Finalist• Nothing in Japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirino’s award-winning literary mystery Out . a b c d e Kirino, Natsuo (2009). "About Her". Bubblonia. Natsuo Kirino . Retrieved 4 November 2013. You may think I’m crazy, but I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong. He deserved to die, so I’ve decided to pretend that he just went off somewhere instead of coming home tonight.”

And yet Masako musters up a stony indifference, makes unwavering courage and resourcefulness her weapons of choice. Even in the face of monstrous evil that spreads its tentacles from the yakuza-governed seedy underbelly of the night for the purpose of macabre revenge, she does not blink. Masako does not believe in surrender as a choice. She wants out and she will secure an escape route. The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s exploration of Out, a daring and disturbing psychological thriller set in contemporary Japan. Written by Natsuo Kirino, one of Japan’s most popular writers, Out won Japan’s Grand Prix for Crime Fiction and was an Edgar Award Finalist for Best Mystery Novel in the United States. Introduction There are two major secondary characters in Out: Anna, who loves Satake, and Kazuo, the Brazilian factory worker infatuated with Masako. Do they see something that the other characters, including Satake and Masako themselves, cannot see? Is it significant that both of them are émigrés, raised in non-Japanese traditions? There's just something about Japan that produces the grittiest, darkest, scariest, most realistic horror, psychological thriller, and suspense. The seedy underbelly of Japanese society is perhaps so successfully portrayed because so little has been embellished. And with the dark, empty surburban streets, so much is possible, so much can go unnoticed. 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.

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In addition to comparisons with hardboiled crime fiction, Kirino's work has been compared with horror fiction (the gruesome dismemberment scenes in Out, for example) and proletarian literature such as Kanikōsen. [8]