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 At home though, she's estranged from her withdrawn
husband and teenaged son. Yoshie, the
oldest of the group, is known as Skipper at the factory because she's 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 when he was 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 repressed and hidden… 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 attracted the attention of
Masako’s old work acquaintance, it was 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 clichéd, 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 finally connect, and 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
