While living in Japan, I worked for a company that had English schools the length and breadth of the country. Some people reading the book might think Kuniko’s situation is exaggerated for the sake of the story, but it isn’t.
In a desperate bid to meet these warped expectations, she applies for credit card after credit card, using the borrowed money to buy expensive clothes and makeup in the hopes that it will all make her ‘pretty’ enough for these jobs. In short, she’s unable to find work in a customer-facing role because employers believe that it’s a woman’s apparent beauty that reels the customers in. She’s not conventionally attractive and because of this, she’s unable to find a job that will pay her a decent wage. Then there’s Kuniko, a young woman drowning in credit card debt. When she rightly requests more responsibilities and a wage that reflects her experience and skill, she’s branded as unreasonable and is essentially driven out of the company. One of the book’s main characters, Masako, starts her working life as an ambitious young woman, but as the years pass, the misogyny running rampant throughout her company rises up around her, forming a cage and trapping her in her entry level position, allowing the men she started at the company with to climb the professional ladder towards better paid roles. It tears the lid off Japanese society, exposing the mistreatment of the underclass and the misogyny woven into the fabric of everyday life.
One of the things that I liked the most about Out is the fact that it’s not just your run-of-the-mill thriller it’s also a social commentary. I’m not much of a thriller reader, but I kept finding myself the object of the cover model’s cold stare whenever I was scrolling through bookstagram or looking at Goodreads, so I decided to give it a go. To sum it up in a single sentence, it’s dark and it’s bleak, and it’s stomach-churningly graphic in places. Let me preface this review by saying that Natsuo Kirino’s Out is not a book for the fainthearted. Urn:oclc:271559131 Scandate 20111203032855 Scanner review for this book without any spoilers would be about two sentences long OL5759775W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 94.05 Pages 422 Ppi 500 Related-external-id urn:isbn:4062734486 Urn:lcp:out00kiri:epub:6f5aeb60-593d-4b72-b10c-d57ed4cb63cb Extramarc The Indiana University Catalog Foldoutcount 0 Identifier out00kiri Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t17m19j73 Isbn 1400078377 Lccn 2004304114 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary O元432560M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 20:07:55 Boxid IA141919 Boxid_2 CH120120905-BL1 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition 1st Vintage International ed.
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