A Lazy Reader's Review of "Diary of a Void" by Emi Yago

Synopsis

    When thiry-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace – a company that manufactures cardboard tubes – she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups – because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is . . . Ms. Shibata is not pregnant.

    Pregnant Ms. Shibata doesn't have to serve coffee to anyone. Pregnant Ms. Shibata isn't forced to work overtime. Pregnant Ms. Shibata rests, watches TV, takes long baths, and even joins an aerobics class for expectant mothers. But pregnant Ms. Shibata also has a nine-moth ruse to keep up. Helped along by towel-stuffed shirts and a diary app on which she can log every stage of her "pregnancy," she feels prepared to play the game for the long haul. Before long, though, the hoax becomes all-absorbing, and the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.

Review

    For such a short book, barely passing the 200-mark in the paperback version, I left this book with a lot of thoughts.

    To start with, I think the writing was very good. I feel like this book didn't need incredibly powerful prose or scenes filled with revetting imagery. I've noticed that with a lot of Japanese literature, the stories tend to be pretty "contained". The scope of this book hardly ever leaves the city that Shibata lives in (which I think is Shibuya, please correct me if I'm wrong). But Yagi is able to create such a clear and intense atmosphere. The reader is often inside of Shibata's head as she is a very reflective and lonely person. So there are several scenes where that loneliness is all consuming. And I think that's a testament to Yagi's writing skills. Shibata also has a very dry sense of humor which I found very amussing.

    This novel is obviously a commentary of the role that women are subjected to in society. Before Shibata is "pregnant" she is assigned unspoken tasks around her office like preparing coffee for meeting, passing around any snacks that clients send, cleaning the rubbish and the shared spaces, etc., as well as keep up with the work that she actually gets paid for. These remind me of the unspoken and unrewarded labor that women, more specifically mothers, do in their households. That work isn't asked of them, it's expected of them. 

    In order to get out of doing this, Shibata lies and tells her co-worker that she is pregnant. Only then does she get some sort of relief. She is allowed to leave work "early" but if we're being real she is most likely leaving at the time she's supposed to be getting off of work. She immediately notices a difference in her life when she is able to get off of work earlier. The book opens with Shibata noticing that the grocery store that she visits after work is more livelier. There's more people and the products are in more of an abundance and even seem fresher to her. She is also able to take a bath for the first time in a while since, before she got "pregnant", she would be too tired from work to do that. She even gets to purchase an Amazon Prime subscription and watches a butt-load of movies. Pregnancy has given her a kind of freedom. But, her responsibilities at work have changed now as well, she is no longer expected to make coffee or clean up after her male co-workers and now has more time to do that work she is supposed to do. You know, like her job.

    As I mentioned before, Shibata is a very lonely person. She is a single woman and lives away from her family. She only has two friends and isn't close to her co-workers (not that I blame her though). But when she becomes "pregnant" her co-workers, all of a sudden, take an interest in her and her life. For example, while Shibata is attending her company's end-of-year party, one of her male co-workers comments that he couldn't "wrap his head around" the fact that she was pregnant. The fact that she "got around". She responds by saying that he doesn't know the first thing about her, so of course he couldn't imagine her becoming pregnant. Because these men don't bother to know Shibata, granted she doesn't really want them to, they begin to assume things about her and her life. This isn't the only instance one of her co-workers makes a comment about her and her pregnancy as other men at her work begin to tell her what she should and shouldn't eat as well as a gaggle of other unsolicited advice.

    As the story develops, Shibata seems to being experiencing symptoms of a "phantom pregnancy". She starts doing things like subconsciously placing her hand over her belly at times, relating to expected symptoms relating to the different stages of her "pregnancy", she even goes to the doctor and her baby shows up on the ultrasound. That threw me for an absolute fucking loop. Like how the hell did that happen? I was fully convinced that she had manifested a whole ass baby.

    It isn't until the end of the book that we learn that she wasn't actually pregnant, which makes me think that she perhaps isn't in an exactly sound state of mind. We see this when she reveals that she downloads photos from a woman on instagram who gave birth to a boy around the same time that she told her office she was meant to give birth and passes him off as her own son to her co-workers which, to me, is just crazy behavior.

    We also learn that after Shibata comes back from maternity leave, her co-workers have learned how to make their own coffee, pick up after themselves, and overall do the things that would've expected her to do. So, I guess her pregnancy scheme worked.

    Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I loved how slow paced and intimate it was. There were, however, several instances where I was slightly confused. Mainly during the time that Shibata was actually experiencing a real pregnancy.

Nov. 7, 2024 – Nov. 10, 2024

★★★★☆

Favorite Quotes: "Even if it's a lie, it's a place of my own. That's why I'm going to keep it. It doesn't need to be a big lie – just big enough for one person. And if I can hold on to that lie inside my heart, if I can keep repeating it to myself, it might lead me somewhere. Somewhere else, somewhere different. If I can do that, maybe I'll change a little, and maybe the world will too." ~ pg. 197