Out [ペーパーバック]

Masako, Yayoi, Yoshie, and Kumiko work the night shift at a boxed lunch factory in a characterless Tokyo suburb. Each has her reason for working at night and earning a little extra money: Masako's husband and son have grown so distant that she finds it less painful to be away from them as much as possible. Yayoi has small children and a spendthrift husband. Widowed Yoshie cares for an invalid mother-in-law and a teen daughter in the throes of rebellion, and young Kumiko`s taste for luxury has put her deep in debt. They are ordinary women living in a dull suburb with boring jobs and dead-end lives who manage to find the gallows humor in their situation.. Yet before Out is over, one of them will have murdered her husband, two will embark on a sickening business venture, and one will be dead.

Author Natsuo Kirino won Japan's top mystery award for this novel, which smashes the perception of Japan as a society of either anal, work-focused drones or trendy Ginza teens. These women live surprisingly close to the underworld, and they find that violence and seedy glamour are closer than they think. "Out" is dark, violent, and psychologically astute--the very definition of noir. This is Kirino's first book to appear in English, and apparently her other award-winner will be published in English soon. This novel is highly recommended for readers who like to explore the dark side of a different culture.

Having read this book in the original Japanese, i was curious about the translation. Some called it bland while others said it was "excellent" and even Amazon's own reviewer calls it "unobtrusive". Well, it does not appear that any of these opinions were rendered by people who could compare it to the original so perhaps my two cents here will not be a total waste.
In my opinion, the English translation of "Out" is a work unto itself. I wouldn't even call it a translation; more like an "interpretation". many things which are stated in Japanese are not stated in English. I mean things like, you know, nouns, verbs, adjectives, perhaps entire sentences... it's not like these are subtle nuances.
I think this was deliberate on the part of the translator, whose obvious aim was to create a very smooth, readable product in English. i think he has succeeded in that respect. I think the publisher's marketing arm should be quite happy with its unobtrusiveness.

However, i'm not so sure that i agree with that approach to translation. maybe if you're translating poetry or something whacked out like Finnegan's Wake, you have no choice but to take some serious poetic license. But geez, this is a novel. There is a lot of descriptive language--Kirino's Japanese is much more challenging than, say, Murakami Haruki (himself a translator) or Suzuki Koji (he of The Ring fame). So, i agree that it would not be easy to do a straight-up translation and make it seem like it was originally written in English. But to me, that's half the fun. why do we need to pretend it needs to sound like it was written in English to begin with?

If there are subtleties (grammatical, cultural, etc.) which are too convoluted to convey in a normal English sentence, would it really hurt the book's sales figures that much to throw in a footnote or two? Perhaps endnotes if that is asking too much? I have read Korean translations of several of Kirino Natsuo's books and they all contain translator's notes. These notes provide valuable information to the reader of the translation. The fact that they are present in the Korean translations but absent from the English translations indicates to me that certain American publishers tend to look down on their readership. They seem to believe their readers do not have a sufficiently long attention span to read even the slightest footnote, as if such notes would be awkward and out of place, overly "scholarly".

In recent years works by the likes of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Natsume Soseki have been retranslated because the old standbys were overly interpretive and people reading the translations actually wanted to know what these guys were saying. Obviously something is always lost in the translation; i just don't think it has to be this much.

As Edgar Allen Poe and Rod Serling both demonstrated, the best horror stories take place in the most mundane settings, involving the most ordinary people. Natsuo Kirino's OUT brilliantly follows this dictum, presenting a chilling tale of murder and dismemberment under the most ordinary of circumstances. The result is a gripping page-turner that turns victimizers into victims and ultimately probes the darkest corners of the Japanese psyche.

OUT begins with four typical Japanese women who work the night shift together at a box lunch factory. Masako Katori is a middle-aged, former office worker locked into a loveless marriage to a self-isolating husband and an intentionally mute teenage son. Yoshie Azuma is a widow in her late fifties, burdened with the care of an incontinent mother-in-law and two self-centered daughters. Kuniko Jonouchi is an overweight and materialistic young woman whose live-in "husband" has just abandoned her and her small mountain of credit debt. Yayoi Yamamoto is a pretty young mother of two children and wife to a gambling, skirt-chasing husband who has blown their life savings at the baccarat tables of a club owned by Mitsuyoushi Satake, a small-time hood with a horrifying secret past.

It is Yayoi who triggers events by strangling her husband in a fit of rage. Realizing what she has done, she calls Masako for help, and they jointly decide to hide the murder and get rid of the body. Their solution eventually sucks Yoshie and Kuniko into their plot, and Satake is fingered by the police as the most likely killer of Yayoi's husband. Satake loses both of his clubs as a consequence and sets out on a course of revenge. The four women's lives head into a free falling death spiral as they are unwittingly drawn into one another's lives and into the yakuza underworld. Desperation leads them to more and more shocking actions, resulting in two of their deaths and a chilling battle of wits, culminating in a sado-masochistic climax.

Kirino's writing is serviceable for this type of book, not rich in imagery or description but well-paced, focusing on actions and character motivations. She maintains her characters' sense of desperation and builds her story to a suspenseful climax, leaving the reader guessing how her main characters will respond to events. Kirino is most successful in tracing Masako's discovery of hidden strengths as well as her descent into horrifying depravity. We identify with Masako, leaving us wondering just how dark might be the deepest corners of our own souls.

OUT struck me as a particularly Japanese novel, following that culture's peculiar fascination with ritualistic murder and masochistic infliction of pain evidenced by writers like Mishima, movies like IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, and even the recent spate of pop horror movies like THE RING. America's dark side tends toward mass murderers and serial killers, most of whom are regarded as social misfits or freaks (such as Jeffrey Dahmer, or Hannibal Lechter). The power of Kirino's OUT lies in the very ordinariness of its four female protagonists.

I bought OUT as an airplane read before an 18-hour flight; it proved to be an excellent choice for some badly needed escapism. I am hardly an expert on crime novels, but I recommend this book highly as a good read and a bleak look at the underside of modern Japanese life and culture.