Outlet

by Randy Taguchi, Glynne Walley (Translator)

When finance writer Yuki's enigmatic and estranged older brother is found decomposing in his apartment, her only clues to his bizarre demise are her memories of him. As Yuki descends deeper and deeper into her own psyche, she catches glimpses of her true nature.

A brisk, bristling story of survivor's guilt, treacherous sex, and unexpected redemption, Outlet opens the door to a spiritual dimension that is both new and age-old. The climax is mind-blowing.

Genres: Japan, Japanese Literature, Magical Realism, Fiction, Mystery, Asia, Noir

269 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

田口 ランディ

Reviews

[tomasz goss]

strongly recommended by a friend. i had watched Antenna, at the same friend's urging, which is based on another of Taguchi's novels. Antenna had a strong emphasis on BDSM, which is something not to my liking, and the movie was fairly intense. to be specific, the lead actor had a HUGE adam's apple which bulged out during the sex scenes, and for some reason seeing that made me feel like my brain was being cooked in a microwave. combining that with some of the reviews i saw on here, i had a fairly solid seeming expectation that there would be a lot of crazy freaky evil sex in Outlet. not the case. generally speaking, i thought the beauty of sex was really well portrayed. in fact, it would have been inappropriate for the sex scenes to be any less descriptive than they were.

anyway, having addressed that, in case anybody was wondering about it, i will say what really matters. outlet made me cry so many times. i quickly lost count. for me, even tearing up two or three times during a book is pretty phenomenal. with Outlet, i was ugly crying. i cannot get into the details. this book knows things about me and about my inner life that i do not and will not share. things feared and wished for. i was so exposed. naked and embraced in my nakedness. i feel that i gained actual, permanent insight into the hearts of others, rather than the fleeting glimpses of self-knowledge i am usually prone to find in fiction.

i really doubt it will be so effective for most people. that's the sad fact of the matter. i read it at precisely the right time, and i do believe that this was orchestrated by something outside myself, so if you thought this book was too new age-y or whatever, well, i'm the kind of retard it was written for and i'm glad i read it and i'm sorry you did. if you didn't "get it," that's fine. i certainly did but not by some cleverness or requisite knowledge. the dominoes were set up. Taguchi knocked them over.

ok, so i've made light of sexual content that apparently bothered some people, i've refused to divulge anything substantial about why i was so moved by this book, and i've expressed hostility toward other readers. pretty balanced review. for my final trick: my gripes.

runner up: the tension between rationality and irrationality is well-trodden ground, and honestly pretty tiresome. i was wincing a little at that in here, but Taguchi managed to redeem and elevate this by the time things wrapped up. nice! not a gripe at all!

real (personal soapbox) gripe: as i've seen/heard so often, "shamanic illness" is romanticized a bit. in other words, the suffering of spiritually sensitive people. surely you've heard some post-Esalen chucklefuck wax pollyanna about how in traditional societies schizophrenics and people with headache disorders were seen as magical and got special treatment. blow it out your ass, man. Taguchi is outright guilty of this a little bit, but mostly she just glosses over the fact that so many "sensitives" (scare quotes bc i think it sounds patronizing even if it is a meaningful term) are living every day in agony. a little bit too gee-wiz about the whole psychic breakdown thing for my liking. of course our heroine gets off pretty easy. debilitating illness is for other mediums, not our girl. she has a flu and then a quick and easy mental breakdown. relatively speaking, a zero calorie spiritual emergency. that, itself, is ok, and it doesn't hurt the book. we do have her brother Taka as an example of someone who gets fucking gristed by shamanic illness, but i wasn't entirely happy with his portrayal (full disclosure: he's probably the character i am most like, unfortunately, or maybe, even more unfortunately, the simp coworker).

as a final thought, to annihilate all my pathos and ethos in a single shot, i have recently been obsessed with the song Apollon by Ghost Mountain and the lyric (if i'm hearing correctly) "my mistake is trying not to break down" has been beguiling me and that's kind of what the book is about so that is funny and interesting, as this phrase caught me right before i started the book. (somebody???) works in mysterious ways.

[John Armstrong]

This book reads like genre fiction – basically a suspense story tinged with horror, supernatural and sex – and is easy to imagine as a low budget movie. But I sensed that the author wanted to more than simply craft a story, that she had a vision that she wanted to share. For all the “extremity” of the content, the writing is pretty flat. This may be partly a matter of the translation, but it may also reflect the writing style of the author. (I was curious about this so I read Mount Fuji, a collection of four short stories by the same author but translated by someone else, and had the same reaction. Taguchi has maybe not been as well served as she could be by her translators, but her own writing style does not rise above the ordinary.) There are three kinds of readers I would not recommend this book to: (1) readers who judge works by quality of writing; (2) readers who are repulsed by graphic sex; and (3) readers who are put off by “New Age” ideas of spiritual power and particularly spiritual power of women. If you’re not one of them, I say, read the blurbs and, if they pique your interest, give the book a try.

[Madhu]

If I could give fewer than one star, I would. This book, billed as an "exciting mystery" that walks on the dark side, was one of the most vulgar, repellent, and truly disgusting things I have ever read. The sex scenes would make even, say, Tiger Woods swear to celibacy, and the bits involving incest and a decomposing corpse that left a liquid stain on tatami mats were perhaps the foulest things committed to print.

[Sparemeribs]

she did all of that just to become a prostitute

no wonder this book was the the second hand bookstore

the book was wack asf

[Monica]

I had the chance to translate this book in my own language. This is not an easy piece of writing. These are not words for everybody. It takes lots of faith and openness to enjoy it.
Now... the first time I read it, I felt immediately the English text had lost something in translation. Somthing that is really specific to Japanese style and thinking.
Therefore for my translation I used several versions as a back up, including the Italian one. Point is I analyzed every sentence so intimately and so profound that I completely fell in love with the atmosphere and the weird subject.
Reading it, acknowledging it, translating it into my own language was almost a psychedelic experience.
Try it.

[Miri Castor]

This was...um...how do I say? Really thought this book would be something more, but it's just odd. Probably wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

[giulia]

FOLLE

amato le premesse dell’inizio, la storia mi ha tenuta INCOLLATA !! il finale non mi ha convinto molto però ..
bonus non ho capito tutto l’odio per la psicologia 😭 avrei preferito un punto d’incontro fra sciamanesimo e psicologia rispetto a voler sottolineare a tutti i costi il distacco, soprattutto perché molte idee sulla disciplina riportate nel libro sono false e piene di pregiudizi, il che me lo ha fatto scendere molto (es. eclatante la rappresentazione dello psicologo come deviato che non dovrebbe esistere). tutta la critica non regge e risulta too much

[A ☆]

huh. okay so, i actually kinda liked the book up until the middle part. but then as i got closer to the end, i just find myself disliking the book more and more. i thought the writing was getting flatter and flatter. and the ending… this book left a sour taste in my mouth. it’s odd, and not in a good way.

[Mike Reiff]

I love this prose style, and the concepts - cyber shamans at the turn of the century - are interesting, interesting enough to almost nudge this to three stars. But the plot of largely wandering and at times lost, and there is such an obsession with sex, with shallow quasi- spiritualism around it, this book ends up being more irritating than anything.

[Rachele]

Libro appassionante. Ti travolge. saprei descriverlo solo come fuori dalle righe. Il finale è inatteso e anche strano. Mi ha un po' fatto storcere il naso. Mi aspettavo che si rivelasse lei pazza e si svegliasse in un ospedale o si ammazzasse. Ogni momento , come alla fine quando rivede il fratello al treno avevo il fiato al collo certa che morisse. Il finale è stato una delusione. O forse è prorpio perché è un po' "scialbo" e da non aspettarsi che mi è piaciuto ancora di più. In questo libro non avrei razionalità a capire cosa mi ha fatto provare. So solo che lo consiglieri.

[Zehavit]

A psychological novel about sex, death and madness. The thin line between mental breakdown and spiritual experiences. A modern journey into shamanism. It was not what I expected and I was pleasantly surprised and drank it in one sitting.

[Sara]

vi prego ristampatelo la gente deve leggerlo

[Nina Sakura]

3,5

[Jasmin]

The first half was p good, but it got weird and i hated the ending :-(

[cassidy]

CRAZZYYY book to send to the daughter of your old work friend who you met once as an adult also insane climax bc I did not expect this to really go there 3.5

[Kimmyh]

Yuki is happily living her life, despite a troubled childhood and not being able to make any type of meaningfull connections with other people: She has no female
friends, and, the only time she feels able to understand men is during sex.

Arriving home from one of her, many, one-night stands she receives a call from her father telling her that her older brother, who has been missing for months, has died.

No one knows what happened, other than he rented an apartment, bought cleaning supplies and then seemed to just lay down one day and give up on life until he, eventually, starved to
death;his body not found until it had started to rot in the Summer heat.

Yuki soon begins to see her brother's ghost everywhere and is able to detect the smell of death on people, which actually ends up saving a friend's life when she suggests he visit a Doctor soon.

As she attempts to discover what is going on,with her heightened sense of smell,the mystery behind her bother's death and the reason she is now suddenly obsessed with electrical outlets, Yuki seeks the help of her one-time college professor and lover and, in doing so, is also brought back into contact with two other people from her past.

As she begins therapy, the more she delves into her Psyche, she can't tell if something
mystical is responsible for these changes within herself, or, if she's mentally ill.

The story was unusual enough to keep me reading, but, the supposedly 'Shocking' ending I didn't find all that surprising considering what had been happening throughout the story.

[Amy Y.]

The book Outlet is about Yaki, a twenty eight year old secretary, who finds out that her close brother had mysteriously died in his apartment. Police and detectives made a conclusion that Yaki's brother had died of starvation and malnutrition. However, Yaki thinks that it isn't the case. Yaki soon undergoes her brother's unbearable past and finds a stunning secret that would change her life and her future for her family.

"Wow!" was my first reaction after reading this book! I had no idea that it was going to be this good! At first, I had no idea what this book was about because of it's cover, but I realized that it was one of the most recommended books at Barnes and Nobles. So then, why not try it out? In addition, Randy's writing is so beautiful and it flows well with the story. However, I didn't really like how there was so many provocative details of Yaki having sexual intercourse with several men. I thought that was irreverent to the entire story. Overall, if I would've rate this on a scale between 1-10, I would give this book an 8.5 because of its plot, originality and style of writing!

[Il Limo]

Impossibile, per un lettore occidentale di questi anni che della narrativa giapponese conosce quasi nulla, non associare questo romanzo al concetto di "realismo magico" di cui sono impregnati i romanzi di Murakami.

Non conoscendo che superficialmente il mondo da cui proviene, ci aggancio anche il diverso sapore che del soprannaturale hanno in comune i due autori, così diverso da quello cristiano. Gli spiriti non fanno quasi mai paura. Sono amici e familiari che restano vicini a noi dopo la morte (e che poi se ne vanno) per compiere una missione. Guidano l'inconscio dei protagonisti durante la vita quotidiana - invariabilmente problematica - di famiglie polverizzate dalle psicosi più diverse.

Oltre a questo aspetto interessante, davvero poco altro. Troppo sesso gratuito, che attraversa con insistenza tutti i personaggi fino a un finale in parte inaspettato e in parte insoddisfacente. Una scrittura che ritorna ancora e ancora e ancora sugli stessi tasti, con il rapporto sorella-fratello esplorato in maniera stancante o eccessiva, scegliete voi. Visioni oniriche esagerate nella loro accuratezza e insistenza.

Trascurabile.

[Angela]

Non vedo l'ora di leggere altro di Randy Taguchi. Presa elettrica è stato una vera rivelazione.
L'ho iniziato con spirito curioso da "autrice che non avevo mai sentito", anche se all'inizio mi sembrava qualcosa di "già visto".
Dopotutto si apre con la morte tragica del fratello della protagonista, e l'esistenza di Yuki sembra fin da subito legata a doppio filo con il sesso in modo misterioso... Insomma, tematiche che ho già incontrato spesso nella letteratura giapponese.
Basta poco però perché stupisca, virando in una direzione che non mi aspettavo. Si sprofonda in temi complessi, particolari.
La ricerca di verità di Yuki la porta a fondere psicologia, psichiatria, antropologia, sciamanesimo.
Taguchi sa tenere incollati alle pagine del libro, specialmente dalla seconda metà del romanzo in poi: non riuscivo a smettere di leggere, dovevo capire cosa le stesse succedendo, perché sentisse l'odore di morte in ogni cosa...

[Sae-chan]

A testimony is only as good as the faith the one who listens.

If you don't have a space for metaphysics in your heart, better stay away. And for people who have training in psychology, maybe this book won't sit well in your stomach. I have some sort of faith in the metaphysics and I don't have any training in psychology. That's why this is quite intriguing.

I only wish that doctors open their hearts a little bit more to things that are not yet written in the texbooks. And shamans open their hearts a little bit more to what science has achieved so far.

But I have to admit, I don't quite get the last chapter.

[Vlady]

More of a spiritual journey than what i thought it would be. Yuki, the hero, is deeply characterized by her family and past events. It builds up her past and her unusual present experiences for the end of the book where she undergoes a dramatic transformation that she was unknowingly expecting her whole life. Some interesting concepts about shamanism, vibrations, psychology, and the nature of our world. Although, there is a very mature core to this book with scenes of death as well as sex. The ending was really unexpected but i personally really liked it.

[Louis]

Woeful, self-centred book. It's like early x-files in its desire to include everything remotely weird no matter how tenuously related to the plot, and have the main character repeatedly insist it's all related. To them. God, it even bought Freud in on the party. Unlike other reviewers who seem to think that the sex scenes are the worst part of the book, I would argue that they were perhaps its one redeeming feature.

[Avian Jun]

I'm truly not sure what to think of this book. Vaguely oversexed yet trying to make it all seem like there's some deeper meaning behind it all. I was not impressed with "her road to discovery", which at times made leaps and bounds that wasn't smooth or even satisfactorily acceptable. It felt a little too planned. At times self-indulgent. Only very moderately interesting.

[Giovanni Botta]

Finito nel 01/gen/1970 00:00:00

[Pam]

rec 09/04 via pbs