Kuniko, a plump and rather vain girl, has recently been ditched by her boyfriend after the couple were driven into debt, leaving Kuniko to fend off a loan shark. Yoshie is a single mother and reluctant caretaker of her mother-in-law, who was left partly paralyzed after a stroke.

With the focus on the struggle of women and with most of the men presented in the book coming across as either predators or useless, the novel could be also classed as feminist literature, but I find this classification also unsatisfactory. While Kirino pulls no punches in her descriptions of broken marriages, failures in communication and pervasive alienation, my feeling is that the author doesn’t have a hidden militant agenda: she simply describes the realities of a broken system and she doesn’t spare her feminine actors the same harsh critical light she shines on the men in the novel: Creo que lo más interesante de Natsuo Kirino es que, si bien, sus libros tienen diferentes temáticas, algunas con más suspense y otras con menos, siempre tienen un elemento común (o al menos en las novelas que yo he leído), el papel de mujer en la sociedad nipona con respecto al hombre. Hace un crítica de fondo importantísima, sobre como la mujer siempre es tratada en inferioridad con respecto al hombre, siempre se le exige más cosas con respecto a su conducta social o en el hogar. También hace un crítica bastante imporante al mundo laboral japonés con respecto a la contratación femenina y al trato que reciben estas en según que tipo de empresas. How does Kirino make the friendship among the four women, so very different in age and character, believable? How do the women’s perceptions of one another differ from the way they perceive themselves? What literary devices does Kirino use to bring this difference to light? The novel tells the tales of four women, working the graveyard shift at a Japanese bento factory. All four women live hard lives. Masako, the leader of the four women, feels completely alienated from her estranged husband and teenage son. Kuniko, a plump and rather vain girl, has recently been ditched by her boyfriend after the couple were driven into debt, leaving Kuniko to fend off a loan shark. Yoshie is a single mother and reluctant caretaker of her mother-in-law, who was left partly paralyzed after a stroke. Yayoi is a thirty-four-year-old mother of two small boys who she is forced to leave home alone, where they are abused by their drunken, gambling father, Kenji. Book Genre: Asian Literature, Crime, Cultural, Fiction, Horror, Japan, Japanese Literature, Mystery, Thriller

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OUT is a psychologically taut and unflinching foray into the darkest recesses of the human soul, an unsettling reminder that the desperate desire for freedom can make the most ordinary person do the unimaginable. VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - following on from the success of Vintage Russian Classics and European Classics, these are covetable new editions of the best Japanese writers on the Vintage list

It turns out that he was a pervert but not the pervert. That storyline was completely dropped, we end up having no clue who he was or where he went, so in the end Kazuo ends up being the one parking lot pervert anyway.)A series of careless mistakes and coincidences expose the group to dangers they could not have foreseen. In what ways do their individual flaws and weaknesses contribute to their difficulties? Do their admirable qualities—Masako’s intelligence and her strength as a leader, and Yoshie’s loyal, trusting nature, for example—also play a part in their downfall? Kirino explains that the title Out has many meanings attached to it—out as in “off the path” or “exit,” out as in “no good,” and out as in “outside.” [1] She believes there is “a certain kind of freedom in being completely ‘out.’ If you go out one exit, there's another door, and if you open that, you don't know what awaits you" [1] When asked about the broken bonds in the story, the author says she believes there is no such thing as society and that we are essentially solitary creatures. This becomes clear when people unconsciously release their true nature by committing deviant acts. The book's title clearly conveys the experience of being on the out-side of social groups. Daring and disturbing, OUT is prepared to push the limits of this world - not only in violence and sex but also in human outlook… Remarkable Los Angeles Times Kuniko, the fashionable one, is a delusional middle aged woman living above her means, deep in depth to loan sharks and in denial about her own abilities.