The story is simple. On a hot summer night, a young wife and mother, Yayoi Yamamoto, strangles her husband with a belt. She calls her co-workers at the bento factory to help cover-up the crime. They slice up his body with sashimi knives from the kitchen, neatly double bag the remains, and drop them in trash bins all over Tokyo. Unfortunately for Yayoi, the remains are discovered. Soon the police, among others, are on the case.

In the conventional sense, the book is not a mystery: We already know whodunit. But two key questions arise. “Will they get away with it?” and “Do we want them to?”

Natsuo Kirino’s novel Out draws a stark picture of alienation in suburban middle-class Japan. Since the 1960s, close to nine out of ten Japanese described themselves as middle-class in government surveys. Certainly the women of Kirino’s novel would portray themselves that way, but she shows the hairline faults in a society that prides itself on its equity and relative prosperity. Apply a little pressure and the perfect picture disintegrates.

The novel focuses on four women who work the nightshift together at a box lunch (bento) factory: Yayoi Yamamoto, Yoshie “Skipper” Azuma, Kuniko Jonouchi, and Masako Katori. Ordinary women, living seemingly ordinary lives. “What makes these women special is not that they committed a crime,” says the author, “but the circumstances around these normal women that cornered them into that situation. It’s often merely convenient to depict them as seeking an escape from their life through an act of crime.”

Yayoi is sweet and dedicated to her children. Yet, her husband’s gambling addiction and a penchant for expensive Chinese hostesses cause Yayoi to snap when he becomes physically violent. Yoshie, a widow in her mid-forties, is everyone’s caretaker. She fusses over the factory line, two daughters, and a bed-ridden mother-in-law. Under the veneer of normality, she is the embodiment of the Japanese suburban poor. Kuniko’s lover leaves her; her weakness for designer goods leads to the inevitable scramble to pay off rising consumer debt.

And then there is Masako. On the surface, she lives the ideal middle class life in a nice house with a husband, an executive at a reputable company, and a teenaged son. On closer inspection, her husband is a depressed alcoholic with a stalled career, and her son no longer speaks to Masako after his expulsion from high school. Her old job at a credit and loan company disappeared owing to personality frictions and the failing economy. Even with her affluence, she feels compelled to work the grueling night shift at the bento factory; partly to stem the loneliness of living in a home more like a boarding house, partly out of stubbornness, and partly to break up the monotony of life in the suburbs.

These are real women with real problems, not stereotyped female villains—Kirino draws the reader into their world. “I don’t think I exclusively tell stories of women criminals,” says Kirino. “However, being a woman in this society is mainly an anonymous existence. I don’t think the fact that. . . women are nameless and overlooked is a good thing. For example, a young man once told me that until he read Out, he ‘never realized that regular middle aged women actually had a life.’"

The murder, an act of sudden violence, sets a series of events into play. The police initially arrest Mitsuyoshi Satake, the baleful owner of a chain of successful hostess clubs. The false imprisonment results in Satake’s financial ruin; soon he too is after the four women. As the stresses build, the women search for a way out: “Out” of the “problem,” out from the tedium of their lives, out from one another-- hence the title.

It would be easy to focus on Yayoi, as she is painted as the victim of a reprehensible husband. He beats and cheats on his wife, and then uses up 5 million yen in savings to fund his baccarat addiction. However, Kirino shifts the attention to Masako, a far more difficult, but more interesting, character with “something broken inside.” It is Masako that organizes the women to rally around Yayoi to get the job done. She is logical, intelligent, but almost cold. “It was a human being, but now it’s an object,” she says of Kenji Yamamoto’s corpse. “That’s how I decided to see it.” She then methodically proceeds to saw his head off. A part of Masako, which had been dulled by her tedious existence, is “exhilarated” by this challenge.

Kirino’s writing demonstrates solid range—she shows skill in describing the small oppressions of daily routine without becoming repetitive. Kirino’s strengths also lie in depicting the subtleties contained within various relationships. However, after a strong start, the narrative breaks down in the final scenes of the book when the book moves away from the four women. Violence shifts into overdrive as Masako hacks her way out of her predicament, but it seems at times, almost comical and formulaic: “Kill me now,” she says. Ropes “cut,” blood “oozes” and “pumps.”

Still, the violence and the threat thereof may be part of the book’s appeal: the novel was a best seller when it was first published in Japan and was recently made into a film. However, its success was a surprise to the author: “I didn’t think the novel would sell because the content was so violent and shocking. Around the time of publication, when I was invited to a radio show to talk about the book, the male host didn't want to talk with me because he was upset about the idea of a wife killing one's own husband. When I went to give lectures, women would complain that murder and dismemberment was too cruel.”

Although Kirino won the Grand Prix from the Mystery Writers of Japan, the book is more a social commentary, albeit a suspenseful one, on so-called “middle class” Japan. While wildly different in tone and genre, John Cheever’s short stories brought out similar themes of suburban alienation in America. The characters have their quirks, but not so much so—Kirino balances their ordinariness with the extraordinary decisions they choose to make. The four women, even Masako, are a razor’s edge away from slipping from the suburbs and into the female underclass, or worse yet, disappearing without a trace. While all the women nominally belong to a suburban community and have friendships with each other, they are each alone in their homes and minds.

The story is simple. On a hot summer night, a young wife and mother, Yayoi Yamamoto, strangles her husband with a belt. She calls her co-workers at the bento factory to help cover-up the crime. They slice up his body with sashimi knives from the kitchen, neatly double bag the remains, and drop them in trash bins all over Tokyo.

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