Natsuo Kirino is a leading figure in Japanese crime fiction. A prolific writer, she is most famous for her 1998 novel Out, which received the Grand Prix for Crime Fiction, Japan's top mystery award, and was a finalist (in translation) for the 2004 Edgar Best Novel Award.Rebecca Copeland is a professor of Japanese literature at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, where her research and teaching focuses on women, gender and translation studies. She also translated Kirino's 2003 novel Grotesque.

Kirino's retelling is a taut, disturbing and timeless tale, filled with rage and pathos for the battles that women have to fight every day, battles which have, apparently, existed from the moment of creation