Out

Paperback, 388 pages

English language

Published June 17, 2004 by Vintage.

ISBN:
978-0-09-947228-5
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4 stars (18 reviews)

In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the draining graveyard shift at a boxed-lunch factory. Burdened with chores and heavy debts and isolated from husbands and children, they all secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives.

6 editions

Four women getting dragged into the deadly criminal scene of Tokyo

4 stars

The author did a great job at bringing this grim atmosphere to live. We follow four women trying to get by with a bad paying job in the night shift of a factory. All of them have their respective problems but one day one of the women drastically changes that.

For anyone wanting to read an atmospheric crime story set in '90s Tokyo should pick this up. We get a look at the less favourable sides of this city and its' citizens.

I just want a book where the criminals run an efficient and successful enterprise and never get caught

4 stars

This book wasn't that, but it was interesting. I've literally never read a book by a Japanese author before, so maybe I don't have a good background to describe this. I guess it's like the The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath was an edgy thriller about four women in 90s Japan. The characters have been ground down by globalized capitalism and other systems of exploitation until they are willing to do literally anything to escape their current lives. Eventually, they do escape in different ways, but the price is pretty high. Unlike those other two books, here's no socialist moralizing, but that kind of fits with the setting (I wonder what happened to Japanese Leftism in the 1950s...).

The start of this book hooked me with a vividly depressing account of lower middle class life, and the middle part was very exciting. I didn't like the ending very much, ā€¦

Review of 'Out' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

Based on the reviews, Iā€™m glad I stopped reading this when I did. Iā€™m kind of actively avoiding books with SA wherever I can.

But what actually made me stop is that I was getting bored - it was getting unwieldy. I enjoyed the first 100 ish pages, but the additional perspectives outside of the 4 women were very frustrating. The details were increasingly overwhelming any tension the story had.

Sad to have made it so far only to give up!