OUT - NATSUO KIRINO

Doing my best to read more Japanese stuff and decided to branch out from simply history into some crime fiction. My understanding is that Natsuo Kirino is pretty popular here, consistently wins awards and is considered a leading proponent of a wave of female crime-fiction writers. Since I’m reading in translation and as someone who lives in Japan I was as interested in the background stuff about Japanese life as I was in the story itself. Though, the story itself was quite engaging. The novel is about 4 women who live depressing lives as night-shift employees at a Bento box factory. They each have fucked up home lives in their own ways, from living indebted from being overly materialistic to having sons and husbands who don’t talk to them to having to look after a grandchild and a mother-in-law without a husband. All of the husbands in this book are absent or very shitty and the book is largely about how awful and impossible life as a Japanese woman is, with an incredible amount of obligations and expectations but with dwindling social support. Anyway, the crime part of the book revolves around one of these women impulsively killing her shitty husband, who has spent all of their savings on bar girls and baccarat, and then the other 3 eventually, either for money or a sense of obligation, helping cut up and dispose of the body. As you can imagine the plot thickens from there. They blackmail each other and wrestle with what they’ve done and try to keep it all secret from the police. At the same time the police start to suspect a gangster/pimp who got in a fight with the husband shortly before his death. This guy, who has his life ruined by the investigation, also starts to track the women down for vengeance. The plot itself is pretty interesting and exciting, it continues to provide new twist consistently. There is a B-plot about a Brazilian-Japanese coworker at the Bento factory who becomes infatuated with one of the women which doesn’t really go anywhere. It was interesting to see what life would be like for a not 100% Japanese person in Japan, there is a whole community of Brazilians in the book, but his particular arc wasn’t very satisfying. The stuff about the gangster was quite interesting to me, it touches on some Japanese underworld stuff that was very interesting, and it helped explain the Girls’ Bars that you see everywhere here. However, part of the novel centers around the fact that the gangster had committed a really gruesome rape/murder earlier in his life, served less than a decade and is back out, and it doesn’t seem to me that the Japanese penal system is that lenient. It’s also interesting to read crime fiction about a country where murder is so rare that it’s a big national event when one occurs. Despite a disappointing ending the novel was really engaging and interesting. The main women, and especially Masako, the leader of the group, were incredibly well drawn and fascinating. The sense of suffocation and dead-endedness in their lives was really compelling and sad. 2004 chopped up bodies.