Picos Gemeos

Out by Natsuo Kirino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*Spoiler Alert*

In 1906, Upton Sinclair created a legion of vegetarians when he exposed the meat industry in his novel "The Jungle". Then came Hitchcock's "Psycho" in 1960, terrifying everyone of ever taking a shower again. Now here comes Natsuo Kirino with "Out" and I'm sure you'll never eat another boxed lunch as long as you live.

Although written in 1997 (and causing a sensation in Japan which propelled Kirino - real name Mariko Hashioka - into the country's top crime writing ranks) it feels very current. It even reminded me of Netflix's 2021 "Squid Game". Though set in Tokyo, it has the same themes as the South Korean show: a group of down-and-out people, beaten down by the system, trying to survive at all costs, resorting to crime and murder, embroiled with organised crime, and with tragic results for most involved.

Four middle-aged women work the night shift in a factory that packs lunch boxes. They are at the bottom of the capitalist ladder - their co-workers are brazilian men (Japan's version of undesirables) and others who can't get any other type of work. They are in debt, isolated from loved ones, in poor health, and on a downward spiral. When one of them murders her abusive husband, the other three get roped in with dismembering his body and getting rid of evidence. Suddenly the yakusa (mafia-like criminal org) are involved and things escalate.

Kirino's writing is straight to the point and unemotional, and at time misogynistic (but maybe intentionally?) Some passages were grimly funny, like the one where one of the women swears she'll never eat meat again after seeing the dismembered body. Then, after she helps dump the body parts in Tokyo's largest park, she rushes to a refreshment stand to... eat a hotdog!

A note of warning: I used to think the rape scene in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" was the most gruesome scene ever put to paper... not anymore.

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The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This biography deservedly won the Costa Book award for best non-fiction in 2010. Edmund de Waal not only writes beautifully but he takes the material he researched - in this case his entire father's family going back to the mid 1800s' - and distills it into a page turner.

The hare with amber eyes is one of hundreds of netsuke owned by his elderly gay uncle in Japan, which Edmund inherits after his death. Through these beautiful, tiny sculptures Edmund traces the history of his family - from the grand salons in France where they crossed paths with Manet, Renoir and Proust under the weight of the Japonism popular at the time - through Vienna and its fall to the Nazis. Because Edmund's family were originally Russian Jews - never allowed to forget their background despite their secularism - there's a growing tension in the book as you know that the concentration camps are just around the corner and their idyllic, rich lives will soon come to an end.

There's a neat, moving twist in the story: the secret as to how the netsuke survived the Second World War and the ransacking of the family's mansion. It had me thinking about my own family and how little I know about my ancestry. Also, it made me think of the objects we have around us and how disconnected we are from who created most of them, the journeys they took to get to us, and the cost (sometimes human) involved.

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