Out (アウト)

⚖The case for it

When a woman on a bento-factory night shift strangles her husband, three coworkers help her dismember and get rid of the body, with the same flat competence they bring to packing lunches. The violence is graphic and unsparing, and Kirino will not flinch or forgive them, which some readers find gratuitous. Sit with that, and you get one of the few crime novels that treats a woman's exhaustion as a motive worth four hundred pages. The tedium is the argument: this is what these lives feel like, shift after shift. You will not forget Masako.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Kirino's procedural grind is deliberate, but four hundred pages of bento-factory shifts and body disposal will test you, and the English translation renders it all in strictly functional prose. Worse is the ending, which swerves into a lurid register that betrays the restraint of everything before it. That turn is hard to forgive.

— the honest librarian