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.

A review for this book without any spoilers would be about two sentences long

Out de natsuo kirino