the genre, Kirino does not particularly like mysteries. For influential books from her childhood, Kirino cites Two Years' Vacation, The Three Musketeers, and Little Women as favorites. Many critics challenged and criticized Kirino for her storylines, especially for Out, by saying women should only be writing love stories. In fact, one male radio host refused to talk with her because of the fact she wrote about a husband being murdered by his own wife. However, her fiction has been mirrored by reality with an increasing number of bizarre murders in Japan such as the woman who in 2007 murdered her husband, dismembered his body, and dumped the parts across Tokyo. Writing style and themes Kirino's works, such as Out, ask the reader what they would do if something awful happened to them. By writing novels that people can relate to, Kirino hopes her novels can help her readers through hard times and be comforted. She has apparently been successful in reaching readers emotionally; for example Kirino was approached by a woman who thanked her for the liberation she felt after reading Out. Her work is reminiscent of American hardboiled detective stories, but her use of multiple narratives and perspectives provide "no authoritative master narrative . . . that finally reassures the reader which of the many voices one is to trust". Her prose style has been described as "flat," "functional," and "occasionally illuminated by a strange lyricism." Unlike most hardboiled fiction, Kirino's novels often feature a female protagonist such as her detective Miro Murano, who complicates the typical hardboiled role of females by becoming both detective and victim. By doing this, Kirino "implicates [the reader] in the voyeuristic pleasure of the detective genre by making [the reader] conscious of [the] act of watching." Kirino said she is fascinated by human nature and what makes someone with a completely clean record suddenly turn into a criminal. In addition to comparisons with hardboiled crime fiction, Kirino's work has been compared with horror fiction (the gruesome dismemberment scenes in Out, for example) and proletarian literature such as Kanikōsen. Kirino has noted that her work can be viewed as a portrait of contemporary Japanese life, contrasting it with the work of Haruki Murakami, who she feels writes more for a global audience, calling his work "global literature." Critic Sophie Harrison has argued that Kirino presents a less-sanitized version of Japan, far from the stereotypical