Natsuo Kirino

Natsuo Kirino is Japan's foremost writer of noir — a novelist whose crime fiction has consistently used the genre to excavate the violence beneath Japanese social surfaces, particularly the violence done to and by women who have been assigned lives that cannot contain them. Born in Kanazawa in 1951, she wrote novels in various genres before her breakthrough Out (1997) — in which four women who work the night shift at a bento factory commit and then conspire to cover up a murder — exploded onto the Japanese literary scene.

Out won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award, was a finalist for the Edgar Award, and has been widely translated. Her subsequent novels — Grotesque, Real World, Possessions, The Goddess Chronicle — have maintained her reputation as a writer of fierce intelligence and moral seriousness. Kirino's crime fiction argues implicitly that the real crime is the system, and that the women who transgress it have usually been pushed.