Four women work the night shift on an assembly line at a Japanese factory that makes take-out meals. Arriving and departing in a desolate warehouse district in darkness they work a refrigerated floor dishing cooked rice, laying slabs of pork, applying sauce, and stacking finished boxes. During daylight each of the women is burdened with indifferent husbands who womanize, gamble, ignore, or beat them, demanding, rebellious teenage children, and the thankless responsibility of caring for frail, aged in-laws.
Very early in the narrative (so no real spoiler here) the four women commit a terrible crime, but one that might also result in a great financial payoff.
Out is a mystery turned on its head. The question of who committed the crime is known immediately, leaving two questions still to be resolved. First, will the four friends get away with it. Second, and the greater ethical dilemma, is whether they ought to get away with it. In a society as misogynistic as Japan's in the 1990s we are asked to consider whether these women deserve the (illegal) means with which they might rise above their inescapable dreariness and bone-sapping exhaustion?
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