Out
Out is not a book I would have ever come across on my own. It's a crime novel out of Japan. It was published there in 1997, and it won several awards, leading to it being translated to English in 2003. It was the most recent pick for my book club, and I dutifully read it, even though it turns out I won't be able to attend this time around.
I've read a handful of crime novels over the years, most notably Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, but it's not a genre I generally gravitate towards. When I want those kinds of stories it's a lot easier to flip on Law and Order or one of its descendants.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am far from a connoisseur of this genre. And I'm not sure this book convinced me that I want to dive deeper into it.
The story kicks off when a seemingly timid housewife kills her abusive husband and recruits her work friends to help her deal with the aftermath. They dismember and dispose of the body. But mistakes pile on, the body is discovered, a local pimp is sent to jail when it's revealed that the husband was harassing one of his girls. The ladies use their new skills to start making some extra money and the pimp eventually gets out of jail and seeks revenge on them for ruining his life.
There's a lot of good interesting stuff here. The women all teeter on the brink of poverty and are stuck in their situations for a variety of reasons. The men are all absolute monsters. Even the more sympathetic ones have a lot of trouble seeing women as actual people rather than objects that exist solely for their pleasure - sexual until they're twenty, and a source of food and clean clothes thereafter. A lot of scenes, especially those from the male perspective were hard to get through.
But, I was mostly enjoying this book. Right up until the final chapters which detail a brutal rape and torture. And then we get a repeat of the same scene from the victim's point of view and if I hadn't been ten pages from the end I would have given up on the book then and there.
Ultimately, the ending has come close to ruining this book for me. For all that I was interested in the womens' descent into crime as a way to escape from poverty, I hated where the main character ended up, emotionally. I liked the glimpse at Japanese culture, but I won't be searching out any more work from this author. It's just not what I want to read about.
I've read a handful of crime novels over the years, most notably Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, but it's not a genre I generally gravitate towards. When I want those kinds of stories it's a lot easier to flip on Law and Order or one of its descendants.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am far from a connoisseur of this genre. And I'm not sure this book convinced me that I want to dive deeper into it.
The story kicks off when a seemingly timid housewife kills her abusive husband and recruits her work friends to help her deal with the aftermath. They dismember and dispose of the body. But mistakes pile on, the body is discovered, a local pimp is sent to jail when it's revealed that the husband was harassing one of his girls. The ladies use their new skills to start making some extra money and the pimp eventually gets out of jail and seeks revenge on them for ruining his life.
There's a lot of good interesting stuff here. The women all teeter on the brink of poverty and are stuck in their situations for a variety of reasons. The men are all absolute monsters. Even the more sympathetic ones have a lot of trouble seeing women as actual people rather than objects that exist solely for their pleasure - sexual until they're twenty, and a source of food and clean clothes thereafter. A lot of scenes, especially those from the male perspective were hard to get through.
But, I was mostly enjoying this book. Right up until the final chapters which detail a brutal rape and torture. And then we get a repeat of the same scene from the victim's point of view and if I hadn't been ten pages from the end I would have given up on the book then and there.
Ultimately, the ending has come close to ruining this book for me. For all that I was interested in the womens' descent into crime as a way to escape from poverty, I hated where the main character ended up, emotionally. I liked the glimpse at Japanese culture, but I won't be searching out any more work from this author. It's just not what I want to read about.
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