Reviewing Out
Book: Out | Author: Natsuo Kirino
Cities Seattle -- Dates: 16 to 22 August 2005
Findings
- Lucrative business models are achievable even in adverse conditions
- Psychopaths are psychopathic
- Women are adept at cutting up bodies and disposing of them, for the most part
- Don’t turn your back on your wife
- Murder is easier than its consequences
One Paragraph Review
A very pretty young woman, married to a man who had potential but never achieved it, is forced to work nights at a boxed lunch factory to feed the family. To repay her, the husband gambles their savings away and chases some pretty Chinese girls. So, she strangles him with a belt. Then she gives her friend a call who comes over and helpfully offers to dispose of the body. Hey, with friends like that… Then the women live with what they’ve done. A fun read. Not the feminist tome that others make it out to be. Unless it is new news for you that some men treat women badly.
Authors/Editors: Natsuo Kirino
Source: Vintage
Publication: Novel
Publication Date: 2005
URL:
Keywords: murder, boxed lunches, loan shark, Yakuza, strangulation, rape, gambling, vice
Disciplines: sociology, feminism
One Sentence Summary
A young wife and mother with a no-account husband strangles him on a whim, her friends chip in to chop him, then Tokyo’s underworld rises to the occaision.
One Page Review
Have you ever felt like your wife is going to strangle you and her friends are going to chop you up and dispose of your body in garbage bags? I know I have. Well, Natsuo has confirmed that my fears are well founded.
If I’m a horrible husband, that is. In Out, most husbands seem to be rather horrible, though. They gamble or womanize or just stop participating in the marriage. Women have to carry the slack. The men lose money, the women have to make money to prop them up.
In this case, the women work nights – part time – at a boxed lunch factory. Which is a crappy job all the way around. Perverts lurk in the parking lot. Demeaning work. Terrible hours. Tedious work. But the women persevere to keep their families afloat.
One night the stress gets to one of the women, whose husband has done some nasty things. She strangles him … which comes as a surprise to him. However it’s mentioned on the back of the book, so the reader knows its coming.
I requested that my wife not strangle me with a belt. She said she would at least wait until I was wealthier. I appreciated that and stopped furthering my career at that point.
This book has one really nice line:
He knew that women were capable of this; in fact, they seemed to have a certain affinity for it – for the whole dismemberment thing.
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