Quotes from Natsuo Kirino

The thing I don't like about detective stories is looking for criminals.

A crime is like a crack in reality, and it is the author's role to explore those cracks. As a writer, I like to see how they impinge on people.

It's a very confusing experience living as a woman in Japan. If your husband is white-collar, the wife is blue. Even if you marry a person of status, the wife inevitably remains a rung below.

I'm happy to be told that I am beautiful, but I don't gain anything from that.

'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.

Kids lose their trust in the parents they love, but still accept them, so they end up not trusting themselves anymore.

For research, I like to go to the location of the places in the novels. The first thing that I do is involve my senses: I notice the smells; I open the trash cans and look at what people have thrown away.

I first thought about becoming a writer after the age of 30, which is rather late, I'd say. In my 20s, I wasn't especially good at anything, and I didn't have a lot of experiences. I was just a young woman without a good job.

In Japan, full-time homemakers have no economic power of their own, and they socially lead a faceless, anonymous existence.

I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.

As a child I first became aware that my existence had a purpose when I realized men lusted after me. And that's why I will lust forever after men. Before I even began to worry about homework or any of those school things, I began having secret liaisons with men. And it is men who give me the proof I need now to feel I'm alive.

Someone speak to me. Call out to me and take me out. Please, please, I'm begging you, say something kind to me. Tell me I'm pretty, tell me I'm sweet. Invite me out for coffee, or more... Tell me that you want to spend the day with me and me alone.

She couldn't live her life as someone's prisoner the way he had lived his, caught up in a dream of the past, with no way forward and no way back, forced to dig down inside oneself.

Was it my lot in life to stand forever on heaven's shores watching the glittering swirl of celestial bodies on the other side?

To live and imagine. That's the job left for those of us who've survived.

Walk around Tokyo and all you see are people trying to sell you something. Tell them okay and before you know you have bought something. Make the mistake of telling your address and now you're on a mailing list. Some old guy pats you on the shoulder and before you know what hit you you're in a hotel room. Stalkers' victims, the ones they kill, are always women.

When high school girls like us freak out, people are always able to overpower us before we do something stupid, like hijacking a bus or running around with a knife. Which is why girls arm themselves beforehand so they don't get caught up in something like that. Boys probably aren't so good at protecting themselves.

This didn't make me sad exactly - it was more a feeling that my own world was too simple, too smooth, too boring and worthless. The most I could do was have another name, Ninna Hori.

My lascivious blood leaves me no choice but to lust for men. No matter how common I become, how ugly, how old, as long as there is life in my body I will go on wanting men. That's just my fate. Even if men are no longer amazed when they see me, even if they no longer desire me, even if they belittle me, I have to sleep with them. No, I want to sleep with them. It's the retribution for a divinity that no one can sustain forever. I suppose you could say my 'power' was little more than sin.

But even a nice mom and dad like this can't really sense how their child's been assaulted by commercialism ever since she was little, how she's lived in fear of being eaten alive by the morons around her. They just don't get it. Mom always lectures me about not being afraid of getting hurt, but all she can imagine is the kind of hurt she's experienced herself. She has no idea of the threats that surround kids these days, how much we're bullied, how much hurt this causes.

All I want is for someone to understand me before I die. With death staring me in the face, I finally understand the reason novelists write books: before they die they want somebody, somewhere, to understand them.

Our gods did not come to us in any specific form, but we held them in our hearts and understood them in our own way.

Here was a man who wanted what no one had wanted before: he wanted to get to know the inner workings of the doll-like woman who was me. Karl wasn't interested in me; neither was Johnson. But Kijima's father liked me for who I was. The realization left me feeling numb. I was touched. But being touched is not the same as feeling desire. And I didn't exist without desire. If I didn't exist, then what?

The pain of being treated like a mere object. And a sense that this pain would turn into pleasure.