Out (novel)

Out is a 1997 crime novel by the Japanese writer Natsuo Kirino, published in Japan under the title Auto. It follows four women who work the night shift at a bento box factory on the outskirts of Tokyo: Masako, alienated from her own family; Yayoi, trapped in a marriage to an abusive, gambling-addicted husband; Yoshie, caring alone for a bedridden mother-in-law while raising her children; and Kuniko, sinking under debt after being abandoned by her boyfriend. When Yayoi strangles her husband Kenji in a fit of rage after he beats her, she turns to Masako for help, and the four women together dismember and dispose of the body across Tokyo. Their crime draws them into blackmail, loan-shark debt, and the attention of Satake, a nightclub owner whose life their cover-up has ruined, who begins hunting them down one by one. The novel became Kirino's first work translated into English, in a 2003 translation by Stephen Snyder that was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel, and it won the 51st Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel; it has since been adapted into film and is regarded as a landmark of Japanese crime fiction for its unflinching depiction of women driven to violence by the pressures of ordinary life.