The best mysteries are those that reflect deep psychological and social tensions, and have a higher agenda. In fact, without these resonating elements, a mystery novel can so easily become just a shallow and superficial mechanism. Luckily, Natsuo Kirino's "Out" is full of deep, dark resonances and - along the way of a thrilling and engrossing read -makes some profound points about Japanese society.

The novel opens the door on the lives some ordinary women, working part time on the night shift at a lunch-box processing plant, a dead end job that only emphasizes the domestic drudgery of the protagonists, and can be see as a symbol of the frustration and subjugation of higher female aspirations.

Though their backgrounds and situations differ, the four women share a vague but potent desire to escape the confines of their daily lives. Out of this apparently humdrum situation, Kirino creates a real page turner, as one of the women is driven to murder her husband, and her colleagues decide to rally round.

Turning their job to their advantage, the women work together to cut the body up into small pieces and dispose of it. From that moment on, their lives begin spinning out of control, either towards destruction or liberation.

With majestic prose and artistic descriptions, Kirino creates an exquisite level of anxiety and fear in our minds. She deals expertly with the motives that got the women involved in such a heinous crime, and maintains the suspense about what will happen next with unpredictable plot developments that make the reader want to finish the entire story in one sitting.

The characters deal with issues that are of real importance in contemporary Japan - domestic violence, the care of the elderly, the consumeristic allure of famous brands, and the silently impaired family ties that result in stolid apathy.

While the women in the novel wish to break their chains, there is no easy escape, and they have to tough it out, day by day, like so many people in Japan, caught on a complex web of obligations and expectations. It is these resonating factors that give "Out" its unique darkness and make it a Japanese mystery novel of the highest quality.

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS

"Out" by Natsuo Kirino is the story of Yayoi Yamamoto, a factory worker, who kills her abusive husband after years of abuse and humiliation. The title "Out" manifests itself in many characters through their search for release from their personal torments and their search to satisfy their selfish desires. The story unravels as each character is affected by the murder and drawn willingly or unwillingly to the solutions the murder will bring to their problems. The financial and emotional woes are not solved for long as the murder awakens an even bigger predicament that money cannot solve. The story becomes a race against time to find a way out, before it is too late.
The first character for find release is the battered wife Yayoi, who reaches her breaking point after her husband Kenji brutally hits her for the last time. She murders him in a fit of rage and thus finds a way out of her prison-like relationship with her tormentor. The story then shifts to the other characters in the story, when the body is dismembered and disposed of by a group of factory worker colleagues in Yayoi's circle of friends. Each woman involved is searching for a way out of her personal crisis and the act of dismembering the body becomes a symbolic release out of their of their banal existence of money problems and dysfunctional families.
The woman who takes charge of the dismemberment, Masako Katori, agrees to assist Yayoi in disposing the body, but is not clear in her response as to her actions, "I'm not sure... But I'll figure that out later" (55). Yoshie Azuma, another woman in the circle of friends, helps to dismember and dispose of the body, after Masako uses a loan she has lent her as blackmail. Yoshie cannot return the money as she used it to fund her daughters school needs and thus her relevance as a mother and provider. The fourth woman in the group, Kuniko Janouchi, is a self-centered, materialistic woman, who stumbles upon the dismemberment while in search for a way out of a financial problem. She is convinced to take part in disposing of the body parts by the prospect of getting money in exchange. She is heavily in dept, with loan sharks gnashing at her for payments and the promise of money becomes too strong a force to pass.
The women get away with the crime temporarily, when Mitsuyoshi Satake, the owner of the bar Kenji is last seen at, becomes the primary suspect in the murder. He is eventually cleared of the murder but loses his business and girlfriend over the entire incident. His primary motivation becomes revenge against those who caused the fall of his empire. Satake is the wrong man to have to have taken the fall, as he has a murderous past. When he was younger, he brutally raped a woman while murdering her and the crime has placed him in a dark realm where the memory of his ecstasy is intertwined with the power of her death. He longs eternally for the release he found in their connection and searches for that moment again. The erroneous accusation of Kenji's murder awakens the monster in Satake and he melds the longing for murderous ecstasy together with revenge, with Masako becoming his primary target.
Meanwhile, all the woman involved in the murder and dismemberment have found their temporary release, in the form of a payout through Kenji's life insurance policy. But their relief is temporary. Yayoi is haunted by her husband's memory, though she cannot forgive him, and her widow act becomes a prison in-itself. Masako is stuck in a fruitless marriage with a husband who has stopped acknowledging her existence and a son who loathes her. The personal hell of being dispensable in her own home becomes the hell she wants to escape from the most. Joshie's temporary relief after the insurance payout is quickly dashed when her daughter steals her money and runs away. Kuniko, finds her release in showering herself with material things and men but unfortunately on

(4.5 stars) In this haunting and compulsively readable novel of murder and its aftermath, Matsuo Kirino explores the widening web of people drawn into the attempt to hide a murder. Reminiscent of Crime and Punishment in emphasizing the psychological effects of murder on the main character(s), the novel revolves around the murder of Kenji Yamamoto by his wife Yayoi, a beautiful young woman who works nights in a factory that makes boxed lunches. Three of her friends at the factory have united to help her after she reacts in self-defense following a brutal beating--figuring out a way to dispose of the body so that Yayoi will have an alibi.

Masake Katori, the leader of the group of friends, is the married mother of an uncommunicative teenaged son. The picture of her life, given in detail, and that of the other women involved in the plot to protect Yayoi reveal the limitations on the aspirations and independence of working-class women and their limited opportunities for the future. Though the three are quite different in personality and in the reasons they help Yayoi, their lives are similar in their lack of control over life's big issues. Though their husbands can do whatever they want, including emptying out bank accounts, the wives remain helpless, not partners in the marriage. Helping Yayoi is a way for each of them to get back at the system.

"Loose lips" compromise the disposal of the body, and soon the three women find that they have come to the attention of loan sharks and the yakuza. As each of the women tries to remain rational and composed in the face of repeated police interrogations and contacts by the underworld, their concerns grow and their fears of discovery increase. Their vulnerability and stresses at work, where they cannot progress beyond their present jobs, increases with the discovery that there's a rapist on the loose.

Kirino cleverly connects every detail from beginning to end--the difficulties of marriage, the subservient position of women, the casual arrogance of their husbands, the female sense of "solidarity," and the ability of the women to capitalize on each other's weaknesses, in addition to the women's individual personalities and the inexorable unravelings of their carefully contrived plan. The author uses descriptions of apartments, offices, parks and clubs to create a realistic setting for the bizarre action, as absurdity combines with irony to bring this compelling novel to its conclusion. A fine noir thriller in which basically good people are stressed to the breaking point. n Mary Whipple

This is an intense book about a group of late shift female co-workers at a boxed lunch factory. It is extremely effective in portraying the desperation in their day to lives and effectively shows how even the most gruesome of deeds can become just another yucky job if the pay is good enough. It's so violent that, at times, it's almost funny yet also very sad and frighteningly realistic as well. This was one of those impossible to put down books but isn't for the faint of heart as it gets quite grisly.

A horrible, horrible book, but very well-written. The main characters are four women working night-shift in a Japanese factory. All four lead depressed lives, crushed in one way or another by the male society around them. When one of them kills her abusive husband, the others come together to help her dispose of the body, but that leads them deep into the underbelly of Japanese society, with no apparent way out.

The above is not a spoiler; it is revealed on the back cover. Indeed, the description of the book as a "mystery" is a complete misnomer. There is no mystery here, but a lot of suspense, as events take surprising turns and new characters become involved in unexpected ways.

Kirino writes from a strong feminist perspective, and her female characters (even a few of the men) are easy to understand, though difficult to like. She leads one into a world that I can well believe is realistic but which I am heartily glad that I do not share; this is a very dark book with few glimpses of light. While the mentions of sex on the cover blurb may seem titillating, be warned that the last 40 pages in particular are so steeped in sadistic violence that this reader at least (not normally a prude) just wanted the book to be over. But it is a powerful narrative nonetheless, which draws the reader in despite his repugnance.

Incidentally, none of the readers' reviews that I have read on the Amazon site, including this one, come even close to the account from Publisher's Weekly printed at the top of this page for its ability to sum up the special qualities of this book in a fair and balanced way.