If you go with this rather unbelievable premise, Out is a great read. I always seem to be doing the jobs nobody else is willing to do… Would these women really risk everything for a work colleague? Not only that, would an ordinary woman so easily agree to cut up a body in her own bathroom? One of the women, Yoshie, sees the job is stark terms, just taking what she does in normal life one big step further The story of Out is a pretty unrealistic one.

When pieces of Kenji are finally found and Satake, the night club owner who fought with Kenji is arrested and a life insurance policy is about to pay out, the four women think they are free but they are about to spiral into a world of violence, revenge, blackmail and backstabbing. Turning to her friends for help, she enlists them (with the promise of money) to get rid of his body but chopping it up and disposing of the body parts in the garbage in and around Tokyo while she pretends he has left her. One night, when Yayoi discovers that her husband, Kenji, has lost their entire savings at a nightclub where he is infatuated with one of the hostesses she is pushed to her limits and strangles him with her belt. Their roles as mother, daughter or wife are proving unfulfilling and the work they are doing is unsociable and back-breaking.Īnd when it does, it unleashes a world that these four women could never have imagined.

Each has her own problems, spirally debt and violent husbands, the pressure of being a carer and ungrateful offspring. Masako, Yayoi, Yoshie and Kuniko work together on the night shift in a boxed-lunch factory. Or more importantly, it is about what women can do when their circumstances become too much to bear. Natsuo Kirino’s Out is a gritty grimy tale of what people are capable of when pushed to their limits.

Out natsuo kirino review