Category: Fiction
Publisher: Kodansha International
ISBN-13: 9784770029058
Pub. Date: August 2003
Date Read: October 2008
“The fact was, you never really knew your own limits until you’d killed someone – there was nothing else quite like it.”
This award-winning thriller, explores the pressures and hardships four Japanese women face and what they are willing to do to find a way out of their respective situations.
They met while working a night-shift job at a plant that makes boxed lunches. The job is dull but so are the women’s lives. Masako who becomes sort of the leader to the women once held a much more important job but now that job is gone and it looks like her marriage is over as well. Yoshie is an older woman who seems to help everyone but herself. Her life is just one responsibility after another. Kuniko lives extravagantly and her money problems are affecting her life. Finally, Yayoi is a young mother of two but is in an abusive relationship that she can’t seem to escape.
Yayoi will find a way out of her relationship when she kills her husband but now she must find a way to stay with her kids and be free from the law. She’ll enlist Masako’s help and almost without giving it a second thought Masako takes over how the body of Yayoi’s husband will be disposed, what will be done when calling the police and how the other women will help out.
These women are not experienced criminals and so mistakes are made but they are driven by their desperation. It is this desperation that author Kirino so well depicts that has the reader almost cheering for the women to find the freedom that they yearn for. How can we be on the side of the criminals, right?
Other shady characters also round out the story and what’s intriguing to me is that even minor characters had fully-developed backgrounds. From the loan shark who once worked with Masako, to the half-Japanese, half-Brazilian factory worker who is just looking for some acceptance, the reader gets to know these characters and their motivations.
Along with exploring the bonds of friendship and women’s roles, we get a glimpse at the seedy underworld and thus this novel has the perfect noir touch. Not for the faint of heart but definitely for those readers who expect and want more out of their crime novels.