They are characterised as victims of a culture that privileges male experience over female, whose legal system countenances man’s position of “power, authority and sexualised control” over women and does not even recognise as crimes sexual harassment and domestic violence, and as inhabitants of a country inundated with pornography, “much of which depicts violence and degradation against females” 2. With Japanese women historically consigned to second-class citizenship in their own country, it is Kirino’s heroines who bear the heaviest brunt of social injustice. Japan’s society has been described as a “purely male-dominated system, typically patriarchal and hierarchical in structure’ that is ‘inherently anti-female” 1. It will be the contention of this paper that Kirino’s tales are not simple ‘who-dunnits’ but comprise sociological analyses of a society that can drive its people to commit the most extreme of acts: murder. This paper will concentrate on three of Kirino’s seventeen published novels that have been translated into English, looking mostly at Out but also making passing references to Grotesque and Real World, both published in Japanese in 2003, with Grotesque issued in English translation in 2007 and Real World in 2008. Out’s female characters are not treasured blossoms of womanhood but four desperate individuals trapped in dysfunctional relationships with men who are predators or parasites, labouring under the burden of heavy chores and responsibilities. In its depiction of four Japanese housewives employed on the graveyard shift at a boxed-lunch factory in a dreary suburb of Tokyo, Out presents a land and a people far removed from popular imaginings of a mysterious East of geishas and cherry trees. Natsuo Kirino is the pen-name of Mariko Hashioka, born in 1951, a prolific crime-writer most famous for her 1997 novel Out, published in English translation in 2004.

The novels of Natsuo Kirino are not for the faint-hearted, nor are they for westerners loath to abandon the cultural stereotype of the Japanese woman as a delicate and cherished oriental flower.

Out by Natsuo Kirino