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The crime novels of Natsuo Kirino

Title	Date originally published	eBook available?	In print?
Out [Auto]	1997	No	Yes
Grotesque	2003	Yes	Yes
Real World	2003	Yes	Yes
What Remains [Zangyakuki]	2004	No	Yes

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Reviews of Natsuo Kirino novels

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Review of Out [1997/2003]

Researching Out, Natsuo Kirino's first novel translated into English, I see that I'm just about the last person in the world to hear of it. If you need more reviews, then, just enter her name and the novel in a search engine, and you'll find dozens.

In a sense, it's a difficult book to include in this listing of detective fiction (or mysteries or whatever we're doing here). There are some detectives, but they're not the chief characters. And there is no mystery. We know who did what was done and—to whatever extent we can know—why it was done. In fact, we're right there with the characters during the crimes and—more importantly—the aftermath.

This is a true novel not a page-turner. The detail is every bit what you'd expect from top-ranked novelists. As Ms Kirino explains in at least one interview, she was interested in the psychological aspects of the murder(s) committed here, and especially in the four women involved most significantly in the plot.

One other review suggests that Out really shakes a "tourist's view" of Japan. I'd agree, but it's not for the crime aspect but for the family aspect. We do not see a single functional family in this book. Instead, we see once again (other Japanese novels have this) the great distance that still separates men and women in Japanese society.

I won't outline the plot. Unlike many mysteries, it's more or less irrelevant. We have said here that reading Asian mysteries is more a way of seeing Asian culture than being entertained by a conventional page-turning experience (which most certainly has its place in our lives). It was interesting to see how few purely Japanese cultural aspects I saw in this book, admittedly a translation. I was even struck at one point how the characters gathered at Denny's for ham and eggs! That isn't the Japan I saw back in the early 1970s. But other books have confirmed the growing internationalization of Japanese society in keeping with that of most other world cultures.

A great read, and I look forward to reading more of this author...

--Michael Broschat Nov 2008

Review of Out

This rather gruesome book is not a murder mystery as there is never a mystery as to who did what nor a detective who investigates it. It is more of a horror/suspense story and that genre—aside from my adolescent readings of Edgar Allen Poe—is not one with which I am a familiar nor of which I am fond.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone who is squeamish or anti-feminist, because not only is it gory, but decidedly misoandrous. Being a male, and one of Japanese descent to boot, I can appreciate why a female author would write a book in which all of males are either wimps or scum, at best. What I do not understand is that not even any of the female characters are particularly sympathetic. For the most part, they are simply pathetic. It is hard for a reader to sympathize, let alone identify, with any of them.

The one character that a reader must focus on, simply because Ms. Kirino provide no options is Masako Katori. She is a smart, tough, shrewd lady of a type that is not rare among Japanese women. She is, however, as deeply flawed and unsympathetic as anyone of the others. She is estranged from both her husband and her son and her friends are all in similar states with their husbands and male in general. One of these friends finally murders her husband and gets Masako to help her dispose of the body by cutting it into pieces, a scene graphically described, but not the most horrible moment in the story.

Almost all of the relationships here are antagonistic and viciously adversarial, even among the women. The characters drift through these dark relationships as if they are all trying to wake from nightmares and the reading bogs down with the dreariness of it all at times. The story becomes compelling when the villain surfaces, a man of course, who is a sadistic psychopath and pits his wits against Masako.

I had trouble finishing the story. I did not like the book. I do not doubt that Japan has many people of this type with dysfunctional lives and families, but I did not find this a revelation of Japanese character or a particularly useful sociological exploration. Even so, I did admire the way in which the characters were given depth. One can come to have palpable feelings about all of them, usually of a negative sort, and that requires talent in the writer.

--Ken Tokuno, December 2009

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