Out and Oz at Twenty-Five: A Note on the Singularities of Natsuo Kirino and Tom Fontana

Natsuo Kirino’s Out was published twenty-five years ago in the original Japanese. A special edition of Stephen Snyder’s English translation of 2003 was released in August this year, alongside seven other classics of its genre. The occasion was the thirtieth anniversary of the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard imprint. Each of the eight special editions features an introduction by James Ellroy, the author of My Dark Places. By association alone, Kirino enters the foremost ranks of western crime and noir, a development already suggested in 2004 by the nomination of Out for the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of ‘Best Novel’.

 Oz, the HBO prison drama created by Tom Fontana, also celebrated a quarter century anniversary this year. The first episode aired in 1997, and the last – six seasons later – in 2003. Like Out, Oz is concerned with the depiction of ‘ordinary people in extraordinary situations’. Fontana went on to win a ‘Special’ Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2005.

The synopsis of Out is by now well-rehearsed, not only in reviews and author interviews but blog posts, YouTube book hauls and by word-of-mouth. A group of women work the night shift in a boxed-lunch factory. Constrained and stifled in their domestic lives, they become entangled with the Tokyo underworld when one of them murders her husband.
 
Oz's concern is the North American prison system at the turn of the millennium. Taking its name from the fictive ‘Oswald State Correctional Facility’, the Wizard of Oz reference extends to ‘Emerald City’, an experimental unit where the harrowing and surreal stories of inmates and officials are played out.
 
Ellroy writes of Kirino with reverence. Of eight introductions, his praise for Out exceeds even that for The Maltese Falcon. Yet a note of disbelief may also be discerned. Ellroy seems surprised that a realistic depiction of the women's lives – drudgery, sexism, exploitation – the preserve, he suggests, of the ‘social-protest tome’, does not detract from or compromise the sublimity of the work in any way.
 
Oz too bequeaths puzzlement. Why, devotees might ask, did HBO’s The Sopranos and The Wire, for which it paved the way (even sharing members of cast with them), receive greater recognition – popular, critical, academic, political – than their precursor?

Twenty-five years ago, J.G. Ballard contrasted ‘truth’ with the construction of 'secure moral frameworks and recognisable characters' as divergent orientations for the novel. Identifying the former with Oz and the latter with The Sopranos and The Wire suggests an answer to the preceding question.
 
Ballard equated truth with ‘severity’. Yet the incompatibility he posited between severity and the outlook of the ‘bourgeois novel’ does not bear transposition to Oz's successors. That series such as Game of Thrones would combine severity with otherwise ‘sentimentalizing’ plot structures geared to viewer reassurance would not have been obvious. Like Oz, Out retains the link between severity and truth, portraying the injustices of its world with detachment. Ellroy’s disbelief and exhilaration have their source in this accomplishment.

References
‘An Endless Tunnel: Author Kirino Natsuo on the Problems Facing Japanese Women Today’ (Interview and text by Kimie Itakura), nippon.com, 9 October 2019.
‘Oz Premiered 25 Years Ago, Birthing Prestige TV With It’ (Interview and text by Joe Reid), Primetimer, 19 July 2022.
‘J.G. Ballard on William S. Burroughs’ naked truth’ (Interview and text by Richard Kadrey and Suzanne Stefanac, Salon, 2 September 1997.

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Author Biography
Shivdeep Grewal is the author of Habermas and European Integration (Manchester University Press, 2019).