Out
Vintage International · first published 1997 · 416 pages
Four women who work the night shift at a boxed-lunch factory are pulled into covering up a crime.
The plain, steady narration lingers on tired bodies, debts, and the grind of the line, and the tension builds without hurry.
For a night when sleep comes only at dawn.
About this book
Masako Katori works the graveyard shift on a lunch-box assembly line on the edge of Tokyo, alongside three women with troubles of their own. When one of them turns to Masako after a desperate act at home, Masako takes charge and draws the others in. Money troubles soon pull in people from outside the factory. The book stays with these women's exhausted, cramped lives and with what each of them wants to escape.