That’s hard to argue with, but simplistic characters-even as a consequence of narrative focus-are still simplistic characters, ultimately, and their defects can’t be erased by invested characterization elsewhere. The distorted lens of this storytelling does create a simplistic moral universe at times in which male characters are all uniformly simplistic and heinous (just in different ways) and almost all female characters are complex and less heinous by virtue of the indisputable oppression they have faced in their daily lives. The lack of redeemably complex male characters in Out is teeth-grinding, for sure, but is also directly related to the simplistic construction of Japanese masculinity in general in this novel and is largely a by-product of the narrative focus, which make all peripheral characters blurry and undeveloped save for the four main female characters. There is a long and winding moral continuum in Out, which makes some violence appear more justified than others, especially when it involves killing male sociopaths, cheating spouses, and morally questionable victims of Japanese organized crime. At the same time, violence has no perfect moral equivalency here. Ironically, the novel argues implicitly that the literal deconstruction of, and the violence towards, patriarchy inevitably makes the four women complicit, even as an act of self-defense or as tool in the erasure of their own guilt. When Yayoi dismembers Kenji’s body, this dismemberment serves a secondary function for the four women, namely, to train them for their new moonlighting gig hacking off the body parts of Yakuza victims (which becomes moral shorthand for characters readers are not supposed to care about). According to the rules in Out, murder becomes its own infinite regress. This freedom, however, become illusory and short-lived. Suddenly, Yayoi is free of her oppressive and derelict husband and their estranged and dysfunctional marriage, which naturally makes her feel empowered by her newly acquired freedom. Afterwards, she and three of her bento factory co-workers (Masako, Kuniko, and Yoshie) cut up Kenji’s body into tiny pieces before disseminating them throughout Tokyo, a literal deconstruction of the patriarchal body politic that is both gruesome and implicitly nationalistic (as if his death were the natural consequence of both infidelity and xenophilia for spending his money on a Chinese prostitute). In Natsuo Kirino’s feminist thriller, Out, Yayoi strangles Kenji (her abusive and profligate husband) to death after he gambles away their savings, a crime that accelerates her criminal professionalization.

Out kirino natsuo