13. Out

By Natsuo Kirino

Olman had first heard about Out (1997) from a podcast on notable crime novels, thought the premise would be right in my wheelhouse (he was right!), and got this for me as a Christmas gift.  Originally, he could only find a used copy of Grotesque, which featured an XCU of a woman’s face in goth-like makeup.  It was also a really thick large format paperback, and seemed like a daunting read.  Eventually, he was able to find a used copy of Out post-Xmas.

Despite reading the English translation (2004), Out was simply excellent -- Kirino is clearly a skilled writer.   I was immediately drawn into the narrative which made for a gripping read from start to almost finish (sadly, the ending was somewhat disappointing).  Still, I loved Out, which became one of my favourites of 2024, if not of all time.

The novel begins with four women working the graveyard shift at a bento box factory in the outskirts of Tokyo.  Their friendship was based on how they made an efficient group in the assembly line.  The women all look up to Masako, an aloof, intelligent and somewhat mysterious woman.  In her past life, she worked as an exec at a credit and loan company but got laid off when the Japanese bubble economy collapsed.  At home, she is estranged from her withdrawn husband and teenaged son.  Yoshie, the oldest of the group, is known as Skipper at the factory because she was such a reliable and indispensable worker.  At home, she’s a widow burdened with caring for her bed-ridden mother-in-law.  She has an estranged daughter who later comes to her for money. Yayoi is the youngest, gentlest and prettiest of the group, whom the two older women have taken under their wing.  She’s a mother of two young children who’s been struggling with a gambling, abusive husband.  Finally, there’s Kuniko, an opportunist living beyond her means who dreams of a better life but is stuck with a dead-end job and an unattractive body.  Kuniko fell into the group by dint of Masako and Yoshie, quickly assessing that fraternizing with them would secure a cushy position in the assembly line.

Kirino described the factory worker life in the same detailed, detached way that she would later use to recount the cutting up of a dead body (getting ahead of myself here!):

The four women always worked together and tried to help each other out, otherwise the job would have been even tougher. The door opened and the workers filed in. They washed again up to the elbows, and their ankle-length aprons were disinfected. By the time Yayoi and Masako finished washing and moved on to the factory floor, the other women had already begun preparations at the conveyor belt…

     “We're starting with curry lunches. Twelve hundred of them. I'll take rice, and you work boxes, okay?” 'Rice' meant being at the head of the line as the linchpin of the whole process, the one who determined the speed of the line. Yoshie, who was particularly good at it, always volunteered for rice duty, while Masako took the job of handing her the containers…

     Beyond Yoshie was a long line of workers: one to even out the rice, one to add the curry sauce, one to slice the deep-fried chicken, another to lay it on top of the curry. Then someone to measure out the pickles into their cup, someone to add the plastic lid, someone to tape on a spoon, and finally someone to place the seal on the box. Each meal made its way down the line, assembled in so many small increments, until at last a curry lunch was complete…

     This was the way the shift always began. Masako glanced around at the clock on the wall. Barely five after twelve. Still five and a half hours of standing on the cold concrete floor. They had to take turns going to the bathroom, one at a time, with a replacement filling in on the line. You had to announce that you wanted to go and then wait your turn, which sometimes took as long as two hours in coming. They'd discovered long ago that to make the job as bearable as possible meant not only looking out for themselves but also working together as a team. This was the secret to lasting at a place like this without ruining your health.

     About an hour into the shift, they began to hear sounds of distress from the new woman. Almost immediately, efficiency began dropping on the line and they had to cut the pace. Masako noticed that Yayoi, trying to help out, had begun reaching across to take some of the newcomer's boxes, though today she'd seemed hardly able to handle her own. The veterans on the line all knew that smoothing the rice was a particularly tough job since it had cooled into a hard lump by the time it left the machine. It took a good deal of strength in the wrists and fingers to flatten the little squares of cold, compact rice in the few seconds the box was in front of you, and the half-stooping position made it hard on the back. After about an hour of this, pain would be shooting from your spine through your shoulders, and it became difficult to lift your arms. Which was precisely why the work was often left to unsuspecting beginners - though at the moment, Yayoi, who was anything but a beginner, was hard at work at the station, with a sullen but resigned look on her face.

     At last they were finished with the twelve hundred curry lunches. The women on the line cleaned the conveyor and quickly moved to another station for their next assignment: two thousand special 'Lunch of Champions' boxes.

One night, before Yayoi’s night shift at the factory, her deadbeat husband Kenji came home early as he was flat broke due to gambling away their life savings at a baccarat game.  Their argument quickly ended with Kenji punching Yayoi in the stomach.  Seized with rage and helplessness, Yayoi later killed Kenji by strangling him with her belt. Unbeknownst to her, earlier that night Kenji had also been stalking a hostess at a night club and was kicked out by the owner, Satake, who we soon learn has been harboring a dark secret.

Yayoi’s first instinct was to call Masako to tell her what happened, ie. her dead husband’s body was lying on the floor of their home.  It didn’t take long for Masako to make the decision to help Yayoi by putting the body in the trunk of her car and finding a way to dispose of it.

All this happened within the first fifty pages of the book.  You can probably figure out how the rest of the story would play out with the other women somehow getting involved in this crazy cover up.  Yet Kirino spent so much time inside each character, that you undersood each individual backstory, personality and motivation.  Here’s one of Yoshie:

None of them could get along without her - when you thought about it, that was her reason for living. It was that way too at the factory. They called her Skipper, and she did, in fact, run the line. The role kept her going, helped her survive the dreary work; it was her one source of pride. But the painful truth was that there was no one to help her. Instead, all she had was her pride, goading her to keep working no matter how hard it was. Yoshie had wrapped up everything personal that mattered in a tight package and stored it away somewhere far out of sight, and in its place she had developed a single obsession: diligence. This was her trick for getting by.    

 

Even Kuniko, perhaps the most unlikeable of the four women, was embued with some fairly rich interiority despite being so pathetically shallow. Kirino was able to inhabit Kuniko’s thought processes and flesh out her flaws, motives and desires.  You may not like Kuniko, but you understood her. 

 

     Kuniko popped one of her husband's cassettes into the stereo and a shrill female voice filled the car with a cloying pop tune….At the best of times, she wasn't really interested in music anyway. She had only put it in to mark her liberation from the night's work and to test the gadgets in her car. Adjusting the vents on the air-conditioner in her direction, she put down the top of the convertible, watching as it slowly withdrew like a snake shedding its skin. She loved this kind of moment when something ordinary could be made to seem dramatic and exciting. If only her whole life could be that way.

     Still, she thought, going back to Masako, why do you suppose she always wears jeans and her son's old shirts? Come winter, she added a sweatshirt or some ratty sweater, over which - worse yet she'd throw on an old down jacket with patches of tape to keep the feathers from spewing out. That was really too much. It made her look like one of those scrawny trees at Christmas: her skinny shape, the slightly dark skin, the piercing eyes, the thin lips and narrow nose - no excess anywhere. If she would only use a little make-up and wear something expensive, more like Kuniko's own clothes, she'd look five years younger and quite attractive. It really was a shame. Kuniko's feelings toward the woman were complicated, part envy and part antipathy.

     But the real point, she thought, is that I'm ugly. Ugly and fat. Peering into the rear-view mirror, she felt that wave of hopelessness which always swept over her. Her face was broad and jowly, but the eyes that peered back at her were tiny. Her nose was wide and sloping, but her mouth was small and pouty. Everything's mismatched, she thought, and it all looks hideous after a long night shift. She pulled a sheet of facial paper from her Prada make-up pouch and patted around the shiny areas!

     She knew how things worked. A woman who wasn't attractive could not expect to get a high-paying job. Why else would she be working the night shift in a factory like this? But the stress of the job made her eat more. And the more she ate, the fatter she got. Suddenly feeling furious with everyone and everything, she jammed the car in gear, released the brake, and stomped on the gas. She checked the mirror as the Golf shot out of the parking lot, delighted at the little cloud of dust she left behind.

     She turned on to the Shin-Oume Expressway and drove toward the city for a few minutes before turning right in the direction of Kunitachi. Beyond the pear orchards on the left, a tight cluster of old apartment blocks came into view. The place Kuniko called home.

     She hated living there, truly hated it. But at the end of the day, given what she and Tetsuya, her live-in partner, earned, it was all they could afford. She wished suddenly that she were a different woman, living a different life, in a different place, with a different man. 'Different', of course, meant several rungs up the ladder. These rungs on the ladder were everything to Kuniko, and only occasionally did she wonder if there was something wrong with her incessant daydreams about this 'different' life.

 

Masako, as the “leader of the pack”, was just so wonderfully complex.  She might be the first literary character whom I could really identify with as a middle-aged woman!   Intelligent, calm, resourceful, Masako seemed grounded yet there was something bubbling inside her.  Somehow her life had not gone the way she thought it would.  Something went wrong in her relationship with her husband and son and she doesn’t know how to repair it, or worse, she knows, but is not willing to try.  Kirino made clear there wasn’t much opportunity for smart, resourceful women like Masako in Japanese society. 

But here was where Out disappointed me (spoilers beware!).  It turned out the night club owner, Satake, had raped and murdered a woman as a young man named Sato.  He was never caught because he had never repeated his crime nor told anyone.  By Sato’s twisted logic, he saw his victim as a kind of “first love”. And committing this violent act unlocked a dark side of him that he had since kept locked up… until Masako crossed his path.  This happened because the police eventually discovered Kenji’s dismembered body (parts of which were disposed carelessly by the unreliable Kuniko!).  They originally arrested Satake as a prime suspect because of his altercation with Kenji on the night he was murdered.  This caused Satake to lose his night club business and the quiet yet lucrative life he had built for himself.  His anger woke up the monster lurking inside him, and led him to track down the four women after being released from police custody.  He became obsessed with Masako, who bore some resemblance to his original victim.  There was a cat and mouse setup that eventually led to Satake kidnapping Masako in order to re-enact his first crime inside an abandoned section of the bento factory grounds.

Kirino has also been setting up Masako’s character for this inevitable confrontation.  As the reader, we know that even though there’s no monster lurking inside Masako, there was nevertheless a dark side to her calm, aloof façade that has also been kept bottled up.  There was some prescience in the possibility of Masako and Sato/Satake being unlikely kindred spirits in their obsession with pain and self-destruction. Yayoi's crime had set off a chain of events that were primarily orchestrated by Masako.  After all, she was the one who offered to dismember Kenji’s body inside her tiled bathroom (some blood-curdling imagery in that scene!) and recruited Yoshie to help her in this highly gruesome task. When their crime attracts the attention of Masako’s old work acquaintance, it’s Masako who decided that they could earn some money disposing bodies for crime organizations.

Thankfully, Masako still had a desire for self-preservation after being raped by Satake and managed to gravely injure her captor as she tried to escape.  But here was the crazy part: Masako ended up falling in love with her killer/rapist as he lay dying…. like a twisted version of Jane Eyre!  And the attitude to rape seemed very Japanese, almost cliched, ie. deep-down women want to be dominated by a man.  Masako and Satake were two sides of the same coin, two societal outcasts who’ve been circling one another until they connect, rather violently too.  I imagine North Americans would be turned off by the ending and from reading some Goodreads reviews, quite a number of them were, while a few loved the way it ended:

abrikosmanden666:  "i completely agree with you. so many ways for them to realize their similarity (if they even have that, idk. maybe just perceived similarity) without it playing out through that torture scene. i had a lot of respect for masakos character and her realizations but i feel like the ending is sort of disrespectful to her character and her principles. and generally i don’t like that sexual assault (especially when it’s this grim) is portrayed as anything good or eye-opening. even if it’s just masakos character finally crossing over into completely insane. there’s other ways to do it “

Otherwise_Design2232:  "It's the perfect ending in my opinion. The point is (I think) that there is something sacred in the intimacy of sharing someone's death. Satake experienced that with the woman he killed before and she did as well. At some point pleasure and pain merge and the outcome is probably unimaginable (although Kiriko did amazing work in putting it into words) . So I believe through the pain, suffering and the extasy of pleasure there is a point where they actually merge together and become one. And that's where the understanding of the other person and the love comes from."

The obsession with death and self-destruction from a women’s POV isn't particular to Japanese lit.  It has also been portrayed in "Western" novels like Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Martin Amis’ London Fields (1989).

Masako wasn’t exactly a “murderee” like Lise or Nicola Six, but she definitely had the death urge. A Goodreads reviewer’s summary of Lise could very well apply to Masako:  

 

self-destruction as self-actualization

 

The ending wasn’t all bad.  Masako survived, even triumphed, keeping Yayoi’s insurance money that Satake had stolen to start a new life for herself.  The disappointing part was her inexplicably primal connection with a monster like Satake.  The story ended with Masako in the Shibuya district, hoping to get a sense of Satake’s old haunts when he was alive, like a lovesick teenager.  Ugh. I felt that Masako could have an affinity for Satake without falling in love with him.  You can have an affinity with someone and still hate, or reject, who they are, or recognize that you’d be utterly incompatible together in real life.  There was no way that these two weirdos could’ve had a life together, their “relationship” would’ve been doomed from the start!

Despite my disappointment at the ending, Out had everything else going for it.  Excellent writing, a well-constructed plot, great pacing, a sense of place (Tokyo society in the early 90s), well-developed characters… the dynamic of the four women really anchored the story. As one review noted:

[Kirino] constructs real, complex, contradictory, and authentically credible female characters who transgress the social hierarchies of Japanese culture while also defying the sexist and stock stereotypes of women as helpless victims in both slasher and thriller genres.

Even the side characters were well thought out.  Like Kazuo, a Japanese-Brazilian laborer who also worked in the factory.  Kirino was able to flesh out the socio-economic backdrop of Brazil and Japan by describing Kazuo’s personal history in a few paragraphs:

 

Kazuo asked an acquaintance about the situation in Japan and was told that it was the most prosperous country in the world. The stores were full of every imaginable product, and the weekly salary there was nearly as much as he made in a month at the print shop in Sao Paolo. Kazuo had always been proud of his Japanese heritage, and if the opportunity ever arose, he thought he'd like to see the place his ancestors had come from.

     A few years later, he ran into the man he had consulted about Japan, who this time was driving a brand-new car, having just returned to Brazil after spending two years working in a Japanese car factory. Kazuo was jealous. The economic situation in Brazil was bad, with no prospects of improving, and he could only dream of owning a car on the little he made at the print shop. He decided then and there that he, too, would go to work in Japan. If he could last two years, he could get a car for himself, and if he stayed longer, he might even earn enough for a house - and he would see his father's homeland into the bargain.

     He had worried that his mother would be against his going, but when he told her what he was thinking, she agreed almost at once. Though he didn't know the language or the culture, his blood was half Japanese, she told him, so the people there would treat him as part of the family. That was only natural. There were successful Brazilian Japanese who had managed to send their children to college and secure a place for them among the country's elite, but Kazuo's situation was different. He was the son of a barber from the poor part of town, and it made all the sense in the world for him to go abroad to seek his fortune. Then he could return to Brazil with his savings and make a success of himself. He would be following in the footsteps of the man whose independent spirit he'd inherited.

     Kazuo quit the print shop where he had worked for six years, and six months ago he had arrived at Narita Airport. It had been an emotional moment, with him thinking of his father coming all alone to Brazil at the age of nineteen. Kazuo was twenty-five when he arrived in Japan as a guest worker on a two-year contract.

     But he soon found that the land of his forefathers didn't pay much attention to the fact that its blood was running in his veins. At the airport, on the streets, he knew he was seen as a gaijin, a foreigner, and it burned him up. 'I'm half Japanese,' he wanted to shout. 'I'm a Japanese citizen.' But to these people, anyone who didn't share their facial features, who didn't speak their language, just wasn't one of them. In the end, he decided the Japanese as a whole tended to judge most things by their appearance; and the idea of fellowship, which his mother had taken for granted and which involved going beyond appearances, was something few people here were actually willing to follow up on. The day he realised that his face and physique would forever consign him to the status of a gaijin, Kazuo gave up on Japan. It didn't help matters that his job at the boxed-lunch factory was less interesting than the work he'd done at the print shop back in Brazil. It was mindless, back-breaking work that seemed designed to break your spirit, too.

I was wondering if Kazuo would show up to help Masako when she was captured by Satake, and fight him off.  That would’ve been cool (and would've probably made a more satisfying alternate ending in a movie adaptation*), but I realize it was important that the ending be only about Masako and Satake.  Ulimately, it meant that Kazuo was not actually critical to the plot, but he nevertheless helped augment the narrative.

There were so many well-written passages that I couldn’t include them all in this review.  So I’ll have to keep them in my Word document for my own reference.

Kirino’s other novel, Grotesque, is still at my MIL’s house.  I just hope it's still there so either hubs or myself can bring it back someday!

* There was indeed a 2002 Japanese movie adaptation of Kirino's Out, but apparently it wasn't very good, nor did it sound very faithful to the source as it's categorized as a "comedy thriller"!  It's a shame, because I think Out would make a great psychological thriller in the right hands.  Due to globalization, the themes explored in Out are universal and could apply very well to other countries