Why a Girl Would Reasonably Love a Statue Than a Man

As Venus educates Rika within the artwork of self-possession, we’re solely reasonably shocked when Rika informs us, “I used to be in love with the marble goddess.” When she abruptly mentions that she and Venus “had intercourse for the primary time”—a dreamy aesthetic expertise that doesn’t require Rika to take off her garments, a lot much less her ever-present raincoat—the shock comes solely within the emotionless nature of the declaration, a persistent energy of Yagi’s. Prurient questions like “How?” and “What?” are merely elided right here.

This knack for surprising, absurd humor kinds the spine of Yagi’s first novel, “Diary of a Void,” from 2020. In that guide, one other dissatisfied worker, Shibata, discovers that her life at work improves drastically after she spontaneously decides to “get” pregnant. She does this by asserting her forthcoming maternity to her supervisors and to H.R. She is straight away relieved of her unofficial duties as the one lady within the workplace—making espresso, cleansing up, distributing snacks—and is inspired to go house on time, as an alternative of staying late, as she often does. Like Rika, Shibata begins to take her personal wants critically, making herself wholesome meals, exercising, doing precisely what she needs. “So that is being pregnant,” she thinks. “What luxurious. What loneliness.”

The catch: Shibata isn’t really pregnant. Because the weeks go by, as her imaginary due date approaches and her lie grows steadily extra absurd, we start to surprise if Shibata is experiencing some sort of hysterical break; the novel slides from straight-faced realism right into a sort of earnest speculative fiction, suspended in what the narrative theorist Tzvetan Todorov known as “the unbelievable,” the liminal zone between the uncanny and the marvellous. It stays on this in-between house as Shibata returns to work and continues to lift her imaginary son, and because the males within the workplace, denied their realized helplessness and dependence on Shibata, begin to make their very own espresso. The implication isn’t just that girls are higher off with out males however that the alternative may additionally be true.

“When the Museum Is Closed” is pleasing, but it surely lacks the important and reducing ambiguity of its predecessor. A part of the appeal and stunning triumph of “Diary of a Void” comes from its proximity to actual life: How far can Shibata probably take this deception? The guide works as a result of it retains one foot in the actual world of twenty-first-century Tokyo, a society genuinely made sicker by the lingering presence of debilitating gender norms. Apparently, Yagi’s protagonists each acquire new names as soon as they’re free of the strictures of patriarchal society: Venus calls Rika Hora, whereas Shibata known as Sheeba by her new mates at prenatal aerobics.

The world of Venus and Rika, although, is obscure. They discuss in an unnamed museum in an unnamed metropolis. Venus is amusingly informal and surprisingly extra street-smart than Rika, regardless of her centuries-long captivity; past the shock of her perspective, although, we study little or no about her. One would possibly suppose that an historical dwelling statue is likely to be essentially the most fascinating character on this story, however we by no means uncover what motivates her, past a clichéd need to get out and see the world. The novel’s villain is the good-looking male curator Hashibami, who needs Venus for himself; a consummate collector, he thinks of feminine magnificence as one thing that may be revealed and perfected solely by the male gaze. Hashibami, who we discover out lives within the museum, appears to need each to own Venus’ timeless magnificence and to embody it himself. There’s a wealthy commonality between him and Venus that may very well be explored right here—who’s manipulating Rika extra? However the novel finally retreats from these complicating questions. The ultimate message is slightly too clear; the fairy-tale setting makes the fairy-tale plot too simple.

Yagi’s books belong to a rising tide in Japanese movie and literature, one that implies males are merely incorrigible, and that the traditional marriage plot is a relic. Whereas in America we wring our palms about heterofatalism or the male-loneliness disaster, Yagi can appear virtually phlegmatic in her misandry: her characters are higher off with an imaginary child or a speaking statue than with an grownup human man. Different examples of this motif embody Mieko Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs” (during which the narrator decides to have a toddler on her personal, a alternative nonetheless uncommon in Japan) and Sayaka Murata’s “Comfort Retailer Girl” (which incorporates one of the vital repellent male characters in current reminiscence). Hirokazu Kore-eda’s bracing Netflix collection “Asura,” which follows 4 sisters who uncover that their growing older father has had an affair, is about within the oft-nostalgized Shōwa interval (1926-89), demonstrating how misogyny has lengthy been on the root of Japanese household and standard tradition. These are all refreshing correctives to the texts that beforehand stood in for modern Japan internationally, together with any variety of small volumes about magical cafés, bookshops, or libraries, typically with cats on their covers.