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More reviews by Paul French
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Out by Natsuo Kirino
OUT is the first English translation of a work by Japan's "Queen of Crime" OUT. One hopes more translations of her work will follow if OUT is typical of her work.
Set in the working class underbelly of Tokyo's sprawling suburbs OUT makes a compelling read. A group of women who work the monotonous night shift at a boxed lunch factory -- rice, beef, curry sauce; rice, beef, curry sauce for eight hours a day -- find their boring, penny-pinching worlds turned upside down when one of their friends kills her abusive and baccarat-addicted husband and they are forced to chop him up and spread the parts around Tokyo in shopping bags.
Being Japanese housewives they do this very neatly. NATSUO KIRINO takes a horrific act -- the butchering of a human being -- and reduces it to a task requiring thought, dedication and resourcefulness that you can't help feeling Japanese housewives might be well suited to. Indeed they are and end up forming a sort of Japanese female version of Murder, Inc. providing a neat way for the Yakuza to get rid of all those cumbersome bodies they apparently have lying around cluttering up the place.
OUT intertwines the desperate worlds of the women as exploited workers, sufferers in loveless marriages, disconnected from their teenage kids and worrying about the bills with their new role as conspirators in murder. Whether or not you'd help a friend cut up her husband into bite-sized pieces in order to pay of your credit cards bills is up to you. In 's Japan it seems a fairly easy means to an end and a decision not requiring too much thought.
Of course while popping round a friend's house to dissect her husband in the bathroom might cause some short terms bonding, it isn't a good recipe for long term friendship, and the women find themselves reacting to the horror of what they have done in different ways. While the Tokyo police may be dumb enough to fall for the innocent looks of a bunch of housewives the city's Yakuza and hostess bar owners are not so easily fooled. It seems that it takes a butcher to recognize the quality in another. Walking away from the deed proves impossible.
NATSUO KIRINO is an award winning crime writer in Japan and OUT won the prestigious Grand Prix for Crime Fiction in Japan while apparently major Hollywood film studios are fighting for the screen rights. It would make a good film, but perhaps not before a heavy meal if the camera is able to portray the anatomical problems of dissecting a full grown man into a couple of dozen shopping bags as well as the book. This is crime fiction without any heroes, dashing and wise cracking private eyes or even a decent copper. It's about people who make decisions, take action and have to live with the consequences, which is, after all, what most crimes basically consist of.
Paul French
12/09/2004
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Paul French is author North Korea: Paranoid Peninsula. He writes regularly on Chinese and North Korean economics and politics for a wide variety of publications. |
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