It has since sold 600,000 copies-huge for Japan-won the country's top mystery award and been made into a TV series and a movie. But her ordinary, underprivileged characters won the hearts of many women. One talk-show host condemned Kirino for "moral laxity" and found it "appalling" that a wife would murder her husband. When it was published in Japan in 1997, "OUT" struck a raw nerve. She also paints a brutally realistic picture of contemporary Japanese society and the despair of the low-paid workers who make it run. Though the story line may be chilling, Kirino depicts the four women as plausible and entirely sympathetic. Together they cut up the body and dispose of it. When she comes to her senses, she turns to Masako, a smart and strong-willed co-worker, who recruits two other women to help cover up the crime. One day, driven by long-simmering anger and hatred, the petite and pretty Yayoi, 34, strangles her husband, a gambler and philanderer who physically abuses her. "OUT" is the story of four women who work nights in a box-lunch factory in Tokyo, filling containers with fried chicken and curry sauce. Every character in my book would have some flaw in her makeup everyone would have something on her mind." "The only ones I could find were about wives in rather well-off families or housewives fretting about their husbands' infidelities.
"I wanted to read a novel about an ordinary, middle-aged housewife, but there weren't any," she says. Yet Kirino, 51, one of Japan's most popular crime and mystery writers, says she wrote "OUT" to create a vision of normality. The novel tackles disturbing themes: the subjugation of women, domestic abuse and a woman's murder of her husband. Natsuo Kirino looks set to change that with "OUT," her controversial six-year-old best seller, just released in the United States (368 pages. Few Japanese novelists-and fewer of those women-have been widely read in English.
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