When, in 1998, Natsuo Kirino published Out (or Auto, in Japanese), her third novel, the Western world was slow to react. Although the novel was welcomed with great reviews by the Japanese and even went on to win the Grand Prix for Crime Fiction, Japan’s top mystery award, an English translation never happened until 2004, when Vintage Books had Stephen Snyder translate it. This was not late, but very late, as, by this time, Kirino’s second novel, Soft Cheeks (Yawarakana hoho), won the Naoki Prize for literature in 1999.

By the time English-language readers had the chance to read Out, the Japanese had already made it into a movie adaptation (2002, Dir. Hirayama Hideyuki), though the critics’ reception was not anywhere near to the book’s. Natsuo Kirino (b. 1951 as Mariko Hashioka) has ever since become one of Japan’s most established women crime writers and the dark perspective she has brought in her fiction has addressed grave socio-economical issues that have somehow been ignored by previous Japanese writers.....To read more of this review please follow this link.

BooksThailand.com would like to thanks Voicu Mihnea Simandan for his contribution of this review. 

Comments are not currently turned on.

There are currently no comments.