Out by Natsuo Kirino

[Kell]

Anyone who would like to get hold of a copy of this book and join in the circle - there are quite a few copies available at

Green Metropolis

 

The Reading Circle choice for January is Out by Natsuo Kirino:

Four women who work the night shift in a Tokyo factory that produces boxed lunches find their lives twisted beyond repair in this grimly compelling crime novel, which won Japan's top mystery award, the Grand Prix, for its already heralded author, now making her first appearance in English. Despite the female bonding, this dark, violent novel is more evocative of Gogol or Dostoyevsky than Thelma and Louise. When Yayoi, the youngest and prettiest of the women, strangles her philandering gambler husband with his own belt in an explosion of rage, she turns instinctively for help to her co-worker Masako, an older and wiser woman whose own family life has fallen apart in less dramatic fashion. To help her cut up and get rid of the dead body, Masako recruits Yoshie and Kuniko, two fellow factory workers caught up in other kinds of domestic traps. In Snyder's smoothly unobtrusive translation, all of Kirino's characters are touching and believable. And even when the action stretches to include a slick loan shark from Masako's previous life and a pathetically lost and lonely man of mixed Japanese and Brazilian parentage, the gritty realism of everyday existence in the underbelly of Japan's consumer society comes across with pungent force.

 

Some questions to consider:

1- Who was your favourite character and why?

2- Was there a particular part you enjoyed/disliked more than the rest?

3- Was this the first book you've read in this genre/by this author, has it encouraged you to read more?

4- Were there any parts/ideas you struggled with?

5- Overall, was reading the book an enjoyable experience?

 

(You do not have to answer all, or indeed, any, of these questions, they are meant only as points for you to perhaps mull over as you read, and provoke more discussion. Please feel free to ask and answer any questions that come up as you read.)

[Michelle]

Ok.. I'm about 120 pages in, and I still can't decide whether I want to continue! I think I have two problems with it so far..

a) With the unusual names, it's taken me a while to sort out who's who.

It's just too unbelieveable to me.. I understand murdering her husband after abuse etc, but cutting the body up to dispose of it just seems a step too far.

 

 

But, I know this is a popular book, so maybe I'm just missing something?

[Louiseog]

Have commented on your thread Michelle sorry.

 

I read loads of horrid, gory thrillers but this one was different.

..... think I felt that I never engaged enough with the characters enough to understand why they acted as they did. Their lives just seemed so awful and drab and what they did was not going to help them to escape. I thought it lacked soul, it really left me chilled.

But am glad I read it!

[angerball]

I'm going to have to re-read this one to fully comment on it - even though I remember how much I enjoyed it, I've forgotten a lot of the subtleties. I just remember thinking how unique it was, and just loving the interactions between the 4 women after the crime is committed. I thought it was interesting that instead

of bonding together, it just completely drives them apart and away from each other

. I know that is sort of to be expected, but it just seemed very...."real" and dark. My least favourite character was Kuniko (hope I've got her name right); she was most memorable for me because of how irritating she was.

 

Anyway, I have one more book to read, then I can move on to re-reading Out. Then I should have more to say.

[Kell]

Currently up to page 205 (section = Crows, chapter 4).

 

Just wanted to make a few observations. Obviously, if you've read up to this point, you can freely check out the spoiler sections. If you don't recognise the names/non-committal titles given outside the spoiler tags, then you obviously haven't reached that point just yet, so don't read those parts!

 

Yayoi's predicament:

 

Yayoi killing her husband - it seemed to happen all of a sudden. i know she'd been hit, but from what I could gather, this had been a lone incident and from all acounts, up until very recently, her relationship had been seen as a happy one. I know her hubby had been keeping his pay from her for a couple of months and gambling it away, but it seemed very little provocation for her to snap so suddenly.

 

 

The involvement of the other women:

 

Although the women work together in a group, there was no indication that they were particularly close to one another on a personal level. I wondered why Yayoi would automatically ask Masako for help when she'd killed her husband and why Masako would so readily agree to get involved. I could understand Yoshie and Kuniko getting involved, with money being the deciding factor on their parts, but so far, Masako doesn't seem to want anything for her involvement. It just seems strange to me that someone would so readily endanger themselves for someone to whom they're not particularly close.

 

 

Disposal:

 

I could kinda see why they chose to chop up the body and dispose of it that way. It seems the most logical way to dispose of a body whilst trying to hide the identity of the victim. The only thing that puzzles me is Masako's attitude to disposing of the body - her cool approach suggests to me that there's something in her past that she's hiding, suggesting she might not be so new to this kind of thing as she seems on the surface.

 

 

Kazuo Miyamori:

 

OK, so we've been told that he's not the attacker that's grabbing women from the factory, but he grabbed Masako out of frustration. Although we've been given a little of his background, I'm not feeling any sympathy at all for him and even from what we've been told, all i want to do is give him a good, hard, punch in the face and a knee to the ground for acting the way he did. Obviously he's going to have some kind of role to play in the saga of Yayoi's husband, but at present I can see very little point in his character at all. I also get the feling that the "real attacker" will also have a part to play, otherwise why even have it mentioned at all?

 

 

Jumonji:

 

OK, so he's a blast from Masako's past. He's obviously going to have a role to play in proceedings - most likely from recognising the guarantor signature on Kuniko's loan agreement.

 

 

So far I'm quite enjoying Out, but I'm not really connecting with any of the characters - I'm not being given enough information to actually like any of them to any degree, nor to sympathise with them very much. At a point almost half-way through, I'm wondering where this is all going.

[Kell]

Section: Piece Work

Chapter: 7

Page: 368

 

There's a quote on this page that, for me, summed up exactly how women cope with unpleasant things:

 

Quote:

There was nothing to tell them what sort of work he had done, or who had killed him, or why. Stripped of his clothes, he was reduced to a lifeless piece of flesh with no links to his previous life. Nor did they need to trace any; all they had to do was carve him up, stuff the bits in bags, and pack the bags in boxes. If you could numb yourself to all the blood and gore, there was really very little difference between this job and the one they did at the factory.

 

For me, this speaks volumes into the "grit your teeth and bear it" attitude of women all over the world. i'm not saying men don't just get on with things too, it's just that it seems to be a particularly female trait, and I can definitely see how they got into the predicament they're currently in after disposing of Yayoi's husband. I can also see why carving him up and packaging the pieces before putting them out with the trash was their natural choice of disposal. It might also be aocmmentary on the "throw-away" culture we have these days...

 

[Kell]

I've now finished the book and just wanted to say something about the very end:

 

Although I knew Massako would get away with it at the end, what i couldn't understand was the sympathy for Satako after he'd beaten and raped her repeatedly, even if she COULD see something between them. I have to admit that given the same situation and given the chance, I would have killed him outright!

 

 

1- Who was your favourite character and why?

Jumonji (see the spoiler for why)

He was the most colourful character and, although he was cowardly, he gave some relief from the plight of the women, even though part of their situation was down to him.

 

2- Was there a particular part you enjoyed/disliked more than the rest?

Not really - I have to admit, it was all much of a muchness throughout for me.

3- Was this the first book you've read in this genre/by this author, has it encouraged you to read more?

It was the first I'd read by this author, but not the first crime fiction (by a long shot) or the first by a Japanese author. Overall, I enjoy what I can onlly assume is the Japanese style of writing (from the few I've read, there have been similarities in the tone and choice of words that I enjoyed). I may well try other books by this author and will most definitely be reading more crime fiction as well as other books by Japanese authors.

4- Were there any parts/ideas you struggled with?

Not really. In fact, from what I'd heard before reading it, I had been expecting far more graphic violence than there actually was. Perhaps I just read a lot of book with particularly violent crime and specifically psychotic characters, but I get the feeling that others might find this harder going than I did - perhaps I'm becoming almost "immune" to the violence depicted in these kinds of novels, as I always expect it to be far more graphic than it is...

5- Overall, was reading the book an enjoyable experience?

I enjoyed it, but I found it a little predictable in parts and most of the major plot-points I figured out quite far in advance, so there was very little in the way of suspense for me (although there were one or two little bits that I wasn't expecting - see my comments before these questions for one example.

[angerball]

Just posted my little review of it on my blog.

 

I have to admit to not being as impressed with it the second time around. Or maybe, a second read just gave me a chance to be more critical, as I was already familiar with the story.

 

A few things that struck me this time around:

 

Something Kell mentioned, about

Yayoi killing her husband. It did seem to happen awfully suddenly, with not much explanation behind it. I know he had gambled away all their savings, was obsessed with another woman, and had hit Yayoi the night before, but it just seemed like there should have been something that happened then and there to provoke her. Instead one minute she was standing behind him, the next minute she was strangling him

.

 

Also, I found Masako taking on the

'new business' of hacking up and disposing bodies a bit implausible

; Masako was a bit of a cold fish though, and I'm sure there was a lot more to her character than was revealed, but it just didn't really ring true.

 

The ending puzzled me as well. Why on earth did Masako

feel sympathy for the man who had raped her, beat her, and intended to kill her. She didn't want him to die

. That's something that I didn't understand the first time I read the book, and I still don't get it.

[Deirdre]

I'm sorry to say it but I gave up on this book today. I have read a little over half of it, but I just don't like it.

 

First of all there was absolutely no character in the book that I even remotely liked. I think the book had a good start, but

as soon as Yayoi killed her husband I absolutely couldn't understand what had triggered her to do so. And yes I know, in other books there are people getting killed for maybe less reason than this, but I really didn't think he deserved this punishment. This said I couldn't understand why anyone would wanna help her and I really came to dislike the character of Masako. Not so for helping her, but for forcing the other two in helping her getting rid of the body

.

 

So I just gave up as reading this book starts to feel like a chore. I just looked at the other posts including all spoilers and I don't believe there is anything in there that can change my mind. Maybe I have better luck with another book discussion in the future.

[Icecream]

 

I have just got to where Yayoi killed her husband, and he did provoke her. I think she was angry because he said she should be nice to him, like she should help him lick his wounds or give him an easy time when he was in a bad mood even though he was never nice to her (or so it seems). That could be enough to tip someone over the edge, especially, as she had already admitted to hating him.

 

As for forcing the others to help her, as a mother I can understand that she would be very worried about her children's welfare if anything happened to her.

 

Obviously this is just my opinion because the book does not say much, but reading between the lines, this is the impression I get of Yayoi.

 

[pickwick]

This was a bizarre story to say the least. This is what kept me turning the pages,to find out how it could possibly have a believable ending!

[Icecream]

I had to take this back to the library. I just wasn't reading it. I got about half way through and didn't pick it up for ages. Partly because of having a lot to do the last couple of weeks, but it was also going slow. there are some very interesting things in it though, to do with culture, and also the charactes. Satake's character for example, was particularly interesting. His thought processes make for a good story in themselves. A phsycologist would love him as a patient. I may get it out again sometime, but it is not for now.

 

The ending puzzled me as well. Why on earth did Masako

feel sympathy for the man who had raped her, beat her, and intended to kill her. She didn't want him to die

. That's something that I didn't understand the first time I read the book, and I still don't get it.

 

It is possible. I didn't get that far, so I don't know exactly what happened, so I can't say anything more, but it is possible to feel sympathy for such a person.