So Out also becomes a cautionary tale of personal finance.Ī moral tale, too: Kuniko, greedy and vain, eventually gets what's coming to her, while Yayoi is not punished for the disposal of a useless and abusive husband. He replies: "I understand that's becoming quite a common arrangement." Meanwhile, Kuniko, who is obsessed with clothes, make-up and foreign cars, is struggling under a mountain of debt and has to take back-door loans at 40% interest to survive.
Yayoi explains to a policeman that she tries to get a little sleep after her night shifts while her young children are in daycare. Masako used to work at a financial company before being the first to be laid off - because she was a woman who spoke her own mind - when the bubble economy burst.
The story, meanwhile, is really a framework on which she hangs a political commentary about the problems of ordinary women in contemporary Japanese society. There was no trace of warmth in this dark earth, yet for a bug curled up tight in it, it was a peaceful and familiar world." Kirino is very good at evoking the eerie nocturnal scene of the factory car-park, or the oppressiveness of the city in summer and the humid dankness of small, dark rooms. And there is a lovely metaphor for the protective deadening of expectations and dreams in the heroines' desperate surburban existences: "When stones lying warm in the sun were turned over, they exposed the cold, damp earth underneath and that was where Masako had burrowed deep. On entering her house, Yayoi is "struck by the familiar smell of home, like the scent of a puppy sleeping in the sun". Then, as a loan shark starts sniffing around, a cop jumps to some unrealistically accurate conclusions, and blackmail and debts strain friendships among the four women, who eventually decide to set up a profitable sideline disposing of other corpses.Īs the plot rumbles on, the flat, functional prose is occasionally illuminated by a strange lyricism. In the meantime he has lost his club, and dedicates himself to tracking down the real killer in order to exact revenge. When bits of Yamamoto are found in a park, the police initially finger Satake for the murder, but eventually have to release him for lack of evidence. She confides in her friends, and they, led by Masako, agree to take Yamamoto's body, cut it up and dispose of it in garbage bags dispersed around Tokyo. When Yamamoto gets home, his wife strangles him with his own belt. One night Satake beats Yamamoto up and throws him out. Yamamoto has also lost all the couple's savings playing baccarat at Satake's club. Yayoi's husband, Yamamoto, is drunk and violent, and obsessed with an escort girl named Anna, who works at a club run by psychopathic gangster Satake.
Four Japanese women - Masako, Yayoi, Yoshie and Kuniko - work the night shift together at a factory making boxed lunches.
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