Mystery novels and short stories, both original works and translated works, have a huge following in Japan. The flow of translations, however, is not entirely one way, but overwhelmingly favors English to Japanese. A scholar of the genre once even made the observation that if you were to take the sum total of all the Japanese-language mystery works that had been translated into English, you would come up with the rough equivalent of a "single month's" output by Japanese authors.
The number of Japanese novels available in English continues to increase by several a year, and titles now can be found by deceased masters of the genre such as Seicho Matsumoto, Akimitsu Takagi and Seishi Mizoguchi, as well as by active authors including Shizuko Natsuki and Jiro Akagawa. The translation bottleneck, however, remains a formidable barrier to their wider dissemination.
We should, therefore, be grateful for Kodansha International's decision to publish "Out." Winner of the 51st Grand Prix by the Japan Mystery Writers' Association, this book is not a classic puzzler, being somewhat closer to the macabre style of Shirley Jackson than to the English drawing-room formula of Agatha Christie. Central to the plot are Yayoi, Masako, Yoshie and Kuniko, four friends who work the graveyard shift on a dreary factory assembly line. They spend 5 1/2 hours each day inserting rice, slices of fried pork, pickles and so on into each "Champion's box lunch" to be sold at convenience stores the next morning. Physically drained, they then drag themselves home to their dreary rabbit hutches, where they are expected to tend to the needs of callously ungrateful family members. Why, it's almost enough to drive one to murder. Which is just what occurs.