Work and Death in the Global City: Natsuo Kirino’s Out as Neoliberal Noir

Abstract

Breu examines how Kirino uses the tropes of transnational noir, and the setting of Tokyo as global city, to focus on those who are on the losing end of global neoliberalism. By telling the stories of downwardly mobile women factory workers whose specifically gendered experiences mark the ways in which neoliberalism colludes with structural forms of sexism, misogyny and economic exploitation, Breu shows how Kirino challenges and disrupts the boosterish rhetoric and moral optimism that often accompanies neoliberalism. Instead of celebrating neoliberal “progress” or offering us an affirmative vision of female emancipation, Kirino’s novel, Breu argues, reimagines the forms of affect produced by the transformation of Tokyo as wholly destructive for her female protagonists. As such, Out explores the gendered effects and affects of economic disposability, and the extent to which this results in a culture of violence and death, especially for women, which is an inescapable feature of the contemporary landscape of neoliberal globalization.