Madeline Ashby's Reviews > Out

I've been thinking about "Out" a lot, lately. I found it far more interesting than her followup, "Grotesque," despite its being a far more straightforward story. The story is about four women who work the night shift at a bento factory, preparing lunches for sale in convenience stores. (Anyone who has spent any time in Japan will remember these lunches.) The night shift is hard, but all of these women are doing it to make ends meet because the other members of their family can't make it happen, either through shiftlessness or disability. Things go awry when the youngest and cutest of their number kills her husband. Guided by the eldest in the group, the "Skipper," the four women butcher the man and hide him in pieces all over town.

That is the beginning of the story.

What follows is an exploration of Japan as it was in 1998 (three years after the Kobe quake and the Aum cult attack on the Tokyo subway system), including compensated dating, the position of the yakuza, and marginalized immigrants to Japan. It dips into the perspectives of each woman, the tensions keeping them in place, and how each of them wants...out.