A Woman's Work is Never Done: "Out" by Natsuo Kirino

I'm basically in love with Natsuo Kirino. A hugely famous and well-respected literary novelist from Japan, Kirino was introduced to North America in 2003 when "Out" was translated into English. Earlier this year, I read her second novel to be translated: "Grotesque." It knocked me straight onto my (formidable) ass- I had never before met such a spiteful, unlikeable, complicated main character. Sadly, because I read it in the early summer, it's ineligible for a clammy. Picking up "Out" was, in a way, my strategy for making Natsuo Kirino eligible. Frankly, I think I like "Out" better than "Grotesque," which is an enormous compliment because both are brilliant.

"Out" begins in a bleak box-lunch factory in the suburban outskirts of Tokyo, as four women- Masako, Yayoi, Yoshie and Kuniko- work the night shift together. Simultaneously grueling and tedious, the work is awful, but all four women need to do it for their own reasons. Masako is hardly on speaking terms with her husband and son, so she's there in order to work opposite shifts from them. Yayoi, the young and pretty one, is helping her husband save money so they can move into a new apartment with their young kids. Yoshie is widowed and taking care of a teenaged daughter and invalid mother-in-law. Kuniko is fat and vain, obsessed with fashion, makeup, and imported cars, and is understandably struggling under a mountain of debt.

One night, when Yayoi's husband comes home drunk, admits that he's spent all their savings on gambling and prostitutes, and then hits her, everything changes. In a strange, surreal moment of rage and psychosis, she strangles him with his belt. Later, at the factory, she confesses to Masako who, for reasons she herself is unsure of, agrees to take care of everything. The four women cut up Yayoi's husband's body in Masako's bathroom, divide the pieces among themselves, and scatter them in dumpsters across the suburbs. What follows is a grisly, disturbing novel as the women get away with the crime, but are ultimately found out by the man who was accused of it and later released for lack of evidence.

While Yayoi, Masako, Yoshie, and Kuniko are given almost equal narrative attention, this is really Masako's story. Masako is the one woman out of the four who originally insists on not being paid for her part in cutting up and disposing of the body. What's more, through crossing this line, Masako finds that she has a predilection for sociopathic behaviour. She encounters another criminal- a thug she crossed paths with in an earlier career- and realizes that they have a lot in common. Together with Yoshie (by far the most financially desperate of the women), they start a business cutting up and disposing of bodies for a Tokyo gang, all the while being stalked and threatened by the man who has found them out.

It would be easy enough to say that "Out" is propelled by shock-value alone, but that isn't really the case. There is nothing gimmicky about Kirino's clever depiction of a bleak world where a woman's choice of husband determines her destiny. This book is as much theme-driven as it is plot-driven, being ultimately about perverse feminism, vigilante justice, and our own potential for evil. In one of the most memorable scenes in the book, Yoshie flatly says that cutting up bodies isn't so different from changing her mother-in-law's diapers or working the line at the boxed-lunch factory. It's the work no one else wants to do.

A few critics have argued that the prose is flat and wooden. It sometimes is, but I'm tempted to blame the translation. Even the Guardian's Stephen Poole, in a lukewarm review, admits that the "flat, funtional prose" is occasionally illuminated by a strange lyricism. I was particularly impressed by this line about the gradual deadening of expectations and hope in the women's suburban lives:

"When stones lying warm in the sun were turned over, they exposed the cold, damp earth undernearth; and that was where Masako had burrowed deep. there was no trace of warmth in this dark earth, yet for a bug curled up tight in it, it was a peaceful and familiar world."

"Out" won Japan's top mystery award when it was published in its original language in 1997.

Life Imitates Art: The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier

Look at this slender, handsome thing! The cover effortlessly beats the hell out of that pastel embarrassment that encloses "Prep." Recommended to me six months ago by a friend, "The Mystery Guest" was devoured today over the course of two subway rides and a half-hour dinner break. Book covers are important. They ARE. One must feel confident reading a book in public, and I'm not ashamed to say that I felt great reading "The Mystery Guest" on the subway today. Commuters were peeking at my book left and right, and I felt like I knew an important little secret. I felt sorry for my peers for not being in on it.

Breakups are bullshit- humiliating and devastating for the dumped because, really, when it comes down to it, being abandonned by a loved one teaches us that we're "a less exemplary person than [we had] thought." The first few pages floored me- I can't recall having read such a true description of the emotional wreckage that follows such a blow:

"I was home in the middle of the afternoon, and it was cold out, and I'd gone to sleep in all my clothes, wrapped up in a blanket, the way I generally did when I was home by myself. Cold and oblivion were all I was looking for at the time, but this didn't worry me. Sooner or later, I knew, I'd rejoin the world of the living. Just not yet. I felt I had seen enough. Beings, things, landscapes...I had enough to last me for the next two hundred years and saw no reason to go hunting for new material. I didn't want any trouble."

The above, by the way, is five years after the nameless Gregoire has been left, wordlessly, by his girlfriend. If he doesn't want any trouble, he gets it anyway, as the phone rings and it's the heartbreaker herself, calling suddenly after five years, not to offer any explanations or to ask to see him (or even to acknowledge their past at all), but rather to invite him to a birthday party--for a woman he's never met--where he is to play the role of "the mystery guest". What follows (as Gregoire prepares for the party and spends his rent money on a vintage bottle of wine that no one will, in fact, ever drink) is a frantic, Woody Allen-esque internal monologue bursting with hope, imagined reconciliations, speculation, faux significance, and, most importantly, fiction-like logic:

"For once I wasn't cooking the data. Not this time. Appearances never deceive (I told myself), they are their own meanings and there's nothing to look for behind them, and I rejoiced, and the reasons for her call rose up more and more vividly and gloriously into view. And the thing was, the reasons had nothing to do with her! Because it wasn't as if SHE had decided to call late in the afternoon on a Sunday and send me a coded message. No one was that roundabout, I told myself. At least not that pointlessly roundabout. So there had to be something else--call it a force--a force seeking some means of self-expression, struggling to give me a sign, and unbeknownst to her this something had told her to pick up the phone and dial my number at that moment, of all moments, the meaning of which apparent coincidence only I could discern. Yes, I was convinced that this had to be the explanation: for reasons unknown to me, but which might have had something to do with the death of Michel Leiris, something in her clicked and, taking advantage of her need to find a 'mystery guest,' the force stole this chance to slip her hand into mine, to wave a handkerchief like a prisoner locked in a tower."

Simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, this narrative is really concerned with the consoling power of fiction, with the sometimes silly but always very real need to find symbols and portents in the everyday, to create meaning where there is little or none, and to ultimately make our messy lives feel as though they're at least heading towards some sort of satisfying, insightful, and fated ending. What's astounding is that we actually get a satisfying, insightful ending, but I won't give it away. I'll leave you instead with a hilarious bit about turtlenecks:

"Since I'd always hated turtlenecks worn as undershirts and despised the men who wore them as the lowest kind of pseudo-sportsmen with, as they say, the lamest kind of collar, I started wearing turtlenecks as undershirts the moment she left. Basically, I never took them off. No doubt this was magical thinking on my part (if I never took them off, nothing would ever take off on me); at any rate, these turtleneck-undershirts erupted in my life without my noticing until it was too late and I was under their curse. You could even say they'd INFLICTED themselves on me, so that now I hardly remembered the wind on my neck, which is the very feeling of freedom itself. But if that was the price I had to pay, I told myself, so be it. We brick ourselves up in prisons of our own devising, we spend our lives losing touch with ourselves, disappearing behind what negates us."

A Portrait of the Artist in Boarding School: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

I love the hell out of boarding school novels, and the reason for this is probably that I love the hell out of novels with child and teenaged protagonists. The boarding school bildungsroman, in particular, makes me want to tap dance all over the place because the gated and turreted school setting will doubtlessly serve to not only enclose and isolate a huge group of kids (some snobbish, some shy, all hormonal and crazed), but also serve as the perfect place for an insightful outsider to be miserable, to be observant of the rituals and mores of privileged classmates who at once intimidate, fascinate, and repel her, and to ultimately come into her own.



As a teenaged protagonist, Lee Fiora is pretty much the best we could ask for: self-conscious, ordinary, sensitive, and enormously observant. While her almost constant discomfort makes her appear by turns sullen and aloof to her classmates, Lee's interior life is rich. Her voice is strong, clear, uniquely insightful, and often heartbreaking. As a scholarship student at a school that costs $22, 000 per year in tuition and houses glamorous and wealthy students with names like Aspeth, Horton, Cross, and Tullis, she is obviously an outsider. At Ault School, Lee's once solid sense of identity is supremely challenged. Of her first bewildering weeks at Ault, she says, "I always worried that someone would notice me...and then when no one did, I felt lonely." What makes her character particularly realistic and complicated is her own role in maintaining her status as an outsider. For example, when a romantic relationship (albeit a sloppy and awkward one) begins to develop between Lee and the popular, easy-going Cross Sugarman, it is the insecure Lee who, in a misguided attempt to be accomodating, suggests that they keep it secret. She's hurt and appalled, however, when he does exactly that. The fact that her interior and exterior personalities are so different makes her a frustrating character, but it's also what makes her character so human and lovable. It's what makes all of us want, at least sometimes, to do high school all over again.

Some of the most touching parts of the book are the strangely nostalgic reminiscences offered up by the adult Lee- particularly those pertaining to her painful and disastrous relationship with Cross:

"I already recognized, even then, the sadness of another person lying on top of you. They will always leave (what's someone going to do, just lie there forever?) and that's the sad part. You can always feel the imminent loss.

It seemed to me, and it kept seeming like this for a long time, that this was what it was like to love a boy--to feel consumed. I'd awaken in the morning, without him, thinking, 'I love you so much, Cross.' Knowing that other people would not consider what went on between us to be love-- of course they wouldn't-- only made me more certain. When he arrived at night, tapping my shoulder in the dark, then the two of us walking down the hall to the day student room, then finally being in bed again, our bodies overlapping, my arms around his back-- that was one of the times when not telling him I loved him required willpower. Also when he was about to leave. I loved him so much! Later, with other guys, I'd think, 'Do I? Is this what it feels like? does love feel different with different people?' But with Cross I never wondered. There was nothing about him I didn't like. The other guys, guys in my future, were maybe too tall but as slim as girls, they listened to classical music and drank wine and liked modern art, and they seemed to me like sissies. Or we had enough to say to each other to fill an evening, we could go to a baseball game, but it never stopped being an effort. Or their fingers were--not stubby, but not long and sure. If I kissed these guys, I'd wonder if it would turn out to be an obligation, if I was moving forward into a situation from which I'd later have to extricate myself. It's not that they were unattractive, and they weren't boring either. But I never thought of what Cross wasn't. I never had to explain or defend him to myself. I didn't even care what we talked about. It was never a compromise. Or maybe for him it was. But it never was for me."

And later,

"I heard him swallow, and then--all this time, he had been holding the basketball against his right hip--he leaned down and set the ball against the floor. When he was upright again, he said, 'Lee...' and when I dared to glance at him, he was looking at me in a way that was both predatory and tender (I do not think it's an exaggeration to say that my life since then has been in pursuit of that look, and that I have yet to find it a second time in just that balance; perhaps it doesn't, after high school, exist in that balance) and it was because whatever he was about to do was exactly what I wanted while also scaring the hell out of me that I folded my arms and said, 'I'll have to take this all under advisement.' I knew immediately that I'd sounded sarcastic, and I did nothing to correct the impression."

The novel's first six or seven chapters function as fully independant short stories, which led me to believe that I was actually reading a story cycle, in the tradition of "Lives of Girls and Women" and "Funny Boy." The final chapter, though, is a sprawling, 118 page climax and denouement that doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the book's structure and concludes with Lee's rather quick and predictable discovery that "the world [is] so big!" It's disappointing, partly because of it's predictability, but mainly because of it's suddeness. It feels tacked on. Also, I find it almost impossible to believe that Lee could be as poor a student as Sittenfeld describes her as being. Depressed and uninspired, sure. Overwhelmed and intimidated by the academic expectations at Ault, definitely. But surely an observant and introverted teenaged girl who (as Sittenfeld at the very least implies) is meant to become a writer would write an interesting story or be impressed by a particular novel in English class.

"Prep" was nominated for the UK's Orange Prize and was selected by the New York Times as one of The Best Books of 2005. It's a damned good novel and, while flawed, perhaps in the same league as "The Catcher in the Rye," "A Separate Peace," and Kazuo Ishiguro's recent "Never Let Me Go"-- all masterpieces of the boarding school genre. "Prep" is without a doubt one of the best books I've read in a while, and Sittenfeld's voice is an exciting new discovery. That said, I didn't feel as blown away reading it as I did reading "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl last year, or "The Little Friend" by Donna Tartt the year before.