Bill Denton asks:
The article mentions Asa Nonami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miyuki
Miyabi--anyone know their books?
*************** Oh yeah! I was much impressed by Natsuo
Kirino's OUT.
Here's a review I wrote on it:
From Natsuo Kirino comes this grim and gruesome fairy tale.
Alternating stark realism with gothic horror, the queen of
Japanese crime weaves a spellbinding story of four desperate
women working the nightshift at a box lunch factory. Above
and beyond the standard fare for the crime and mystery genre,
the novel delivers on many levels. At once it is a crime
story, a feminist indictment against sexual discrimination, a
philosophical treatise on the existential condition, a moral
lesson on the dangers of greed, and a bizarre and erotic
religious allegory. It is Kirino's special magic that
skillfully combines all these elements into a tightly woven
shotgun ride to hell.
When Yayoi strangles her scumbag husband, her three friends
from work dispose of his body to cover up her crime. Each of
the women has a sad and dysfunctional life, and Kirino
portrays them in an unflinching manner that is still
sensitive and empathetic. Yayoi suffered from an abusive
husband who cheated on her, gambled away their money, and
beat her. Yoshie struggles to support an invalid
mother-in-law and two ungrateful daughters who have gone
astray. Kuniko has succumbed to an obsession with consumerism
that has swept the nation like a disease, leaving her broke
and in debt to some dangerous people. Mosako's family is
financially secure but they have allowed themselves to become
alienated from one another and the walls they have built are
slowly unraveling the fabric of their lives.
Sexual discrimination is a dominant theme in OUT, but Kirino
keeps it closely linked to the story. She also avoids the
temptation to paint her characters as innocent victims
destroyed by discrimination. Masako's ill-fated career
reflects prejudice against Japanese women, but rather than
the sole reason for her downfall, that prejudice appears more
as a corrosive acid that eats away at Masako's weakness, her
tendency towards a coldness in her relationships. Kuniko
shoulders even more blame for her predicament. She is stupid,
shallow, and materialistic, but she is not so stupid as to
miss the value that Japanese society places on female beauty,
and her self-esteem suffers for it.
In his landmark treatise, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Frederick
Nietzsche developed a philosophy dividing morality into a
master and slave dichotomy. Nietzsche explained this
dichotomy by comparing early Christian philosophy with that
of the classic Romans. A Roman expressed his opinions openly
and fiercely worked at altering the world to his own benefit.
Instead of following rules, he made them, his morals
self-serving and ruled by his will. The Roman philosophy,
thus, represented a master view of morality.
On the other hand, Nietzsche exemplifies Christianity as a
prime example of slave morality, stating that the genius of
Christianity is that it deals the oppressed a superior moral
hand. Rather than express anger openly at being wronged,
which could have dangerous consequences, one is allowed
resentful self-righteousness in forgiving them their sins.
Rather than struggling to improve one's lot in this world,
one looks to an eternal life in heaven. Humility is valued
over pride. This, then, is the moral make-up of the slave
mentality.
Nietzsche stated that the master and slave moralities employ
different definitions of good and evil. Nietzsche proposed a
mentality beyond master and slave, beyond good and evil, but
he left no doubt that the philosophy of the slave was a
defeatist philosophy, a will to death. Passive acceptance of
one's lot in life amounts to a negation of the experience
that is the essence of life. Kirino mirrors this in OUT's
epigraph by Flannery O'Connor:
"The way to despair is to refuse any kind of
experience..."
Nietzsche's concept of the two kinds of morality forms a
major theme in Kirino's OUT. Yayoi's strangling of her
abusive husband and his subsequent dismemberment is not just
a crowd pleaser for lovers of the gruesome and macabre. The
murder of her husband is a rejection of the slave mentality.
In this context, it is not surprising that she is exhilarated
by the experience:
"Strange that she'd never known she had such cruelty inside;
still, she found this thrilling." She has liberated herself.
Yayoi confides to Masako: "I somehow feel as though I've
gotten stronger," and later Kirino notes: "Yayoi was overcome
with the sensation that she had somehow been reborn, and she
could feel a certain courage beginning to stir inside
her."
Where Yayoi's emancipation comes hot-blooded and spontaneous,
Masako's involvement is more purposeful and calculated. When
Masako makes the decision to help Yayoi, she puts her former
life, a passive nonexistence of drifting with the tide,
behind her. Like Yayoi, she shirks off the slave mentality
and chooses to exert her will. No longer willing to accept
the poor hand she has been dealt in life, she steps out of
the boundaries of the rules that have imprisoned her and
fights to be master of her life, trading a will to death for
a will to power.
Empowered by her decision to help Yayoi, Masako negotiates a
bitter acceptance of her physical and emotional isolation, an
isolation she shares with a gangster named Satake. Whereas
Masako's predicament has a philosophical timbre, Satake's
plight has a strange sadomasochistic religious undercurrent.
Considering Kirino's professed influence by Flannery
O'Connor, this is not surprising. O'Connor employed
disturbing and profane Christian themes in her writing, and
Kirino parallels this in Satake's endowment of messianic
characteristics upon his victims, with multiple allusions to
the symbolism of the Christian crucifixion. Satake's first
victim is bound hand and foot, bleeding. She has stab wounds
in her side. She finds both agony and ecstasy in her torture.
As she dies, he professes his love for her, and he lives his
life devoted to her memory. He dies a symbolic death in his
first murder, and is reborn. When Masako asks why he wants to
kill her, he responds that in her death he would find love.
As the story progresses, Kirino draws Satake and Masako
together in a spectacular dance macabre.
Stephen Snyder, a professor of Japanese and comparative
literature at the University of Colorado, has produced a
beautiful translation. Kirino's prose for the most part
follows a terse economic style paralleling the American
hardboiled patois made famous by Dashiell Hammett, but Snyder
is equally adept at translating Kirino's lyrical elan:
"Engulfed in the hot stench of the city, he found that the
boundary between his inner and outer selves seemed to
dissolve. The fetid air seeped in through his pores and
soiled what was inside, while his simmering emotions leaked
out of his body into the streets." An economy of style could
have perhaps reduced the word count in this passage, but it
nevertheless carries spectacular imagery.
Snyder has several notable translations under his belt,
including Ryu Murakami's COIN LOCKER BABIES and Miri Yu's
GOLD RUSH.
Kirino was born in 1951, the middle child between two
brothers. As a result of her father's job as an architect,
she lived in many different cities growing up. When Natsuo
was 14, her family settled down in Tokyo, and she has lived
there ever since. Although she has a law degree, her
professional life has always centered around the arts. She
scheduled movies at a theater, edited and wrote for a
magazine, but did not complete her first novel until the age
of 41. Since then she has published 13 novels and three
collections of short stories. OUT is Kirino's first novel to
be translated into English. It received Japan's Grand Prix
for Crime Fiction award in 1998, and was nominated for an
Edgar. SOFT CHEEKS won the Naoki Prize, a major Japanese
literary award, in 1999. Several of her novels have been made
into movies. Kirino's latest book, GROTESQUE, is already
targeted for an English translation.
Kirino's OUT portrays the heart of darkness in the land of
the rising sun, a powerful and compelling work without easy
answers, without comfortable niches. Like Flannery O'Connor,
Kirino suggests a heretical redemption through transgression.
It is painted in dark shades, hinting at a world and a moral
system outside the comfortable confines of what is typically
seen as right and wrong. There is no noble hero in selfless
pursuit of truth. While laying down an unflinching view of a
world awash in apathy, isolation, brutality, and greed,
Kirino still maintains a degree of compassion, and in all of
this sadness and ugliness, there is an unmistakable note of
grace.
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