Out

Natsuo Kirino

Four women work the night shift making boxed lunches in suburban Tokyo. When one kills her abusive husband, she asks her co-workers to help conceal the crime. Their response draws them into a world of debt, danger and people who see desperation as an opportunity.

Kirino takes the reader into kitchens, factory shifts and cramped lives far from the city’s glamorous image. Money, exhausting work and the expectations placed on women make this an unsettling journey through contemporary Japan. The violence is graphic, but the pressures that precede it are painfully ordinary.

A brutally realistic picture of contemporary society.

Newsweek, quoted by the publisher

Women; Work; Class; Violence; Screen adaptation