out, by natsuo kirino

next up on the world book tour: Out, by Natsuo Kirino

half hard boiled crime novel, half feminist critique. played against the backdrop of the drab lives of a group of lower middle class housewives is cold blooded revenge, murder, and extortion. there is hardly any tenderness in this book--just shattered psyches, airless relationships, empty homes, dissipated dreams, ground up by the machine--what women put up with for security and station, at the price of happiness and freedom. There is empathy though flowing through the book, but its always not where you'd expect it.

The psychological break that kicks the story into gear is one woman's impulsive strangulation of her cheating, spendthrift, gambling, loser husband. It is an emancipating event--suddenly she and the crew of co-workers who help her dispose of the body are outsiders, criminals and the strictures that have bound them in society suddenly are destroyed. The door shuts on their previous lives, and another opens, and each has to chart a path through a newly exposed world of yakusa and fringe criminal elements in order to survive. Not all do.

Since one of my core pre(mis)conceptions of Japanese society is the driving force of conformity, I can't really tell you if this is what the author had in mind when she wrote the book, or if I'm just filing it away into a box I had already made for it in my head.

The writing is razor sharp, visceral, and some of the scenes are disturbing enough that I'll be beating them deep into my subconscious starting right now.