After the success of Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami was the first name that most readers outside Japan thought of when it came to literature from that country. Japanese novels came to be seen as encompassing a world of lonely jazz-loving men inhabiting Tokyo nights who are beset by cats, unexpected phone calls, and – sometimes – alternate realities.
A new wave of translations is doing a lot to change this perception. In particular, the work of Japanese women writers such as Hiromi Kawakami, Yuko Tsushima, Yoko Ogawa, and Sayaka Muraka has drawn attention to other types of ennui, often born out of stratified social roles.
This tendency continues with the recent English versions of two novels: Emi Yagi’s debut, Diary of a Void, translated by David Boyd and Lucy North, and Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Both of them deal with how the interior worlds of single women are at odds with exterior expectations.
Yagi’s Diary of a Void introduces us to Shibata, the unmarried protagonist, who is working for a paper tube manufacturing company. As the only woman in her department, she is fed up of being expected to carry out tasks such as making coffee and maintaining the photocopier. To get out of this predicament, she fakes a pregnancy, a move that will have life-changing consequences.
The novel is structured around the duration of her feigned condition, from five to 40 weeks. The men start to treat her with deference, she is able to leave work on time, and begins to eat a lot more. In time, she goes on maternity leave and even joins an aerobics class for to-be mothers. “So this is pregnancy,” she thinks. “What luxury. What loneliness.” Meanwhile, the void within her grows and grows.
Yagi’s tone is wryly ironic throughout, even as Diary of a Void raises searching questions about compartmentalised roles. As the novel reaches its denouement, however, it veers towards the fantastical. Through it all, Shibata manages to stay afloat, never letting the difficulties of her life submerge her - as Lauren Groff says about the heroine of Yuko Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains, another novel that starts with a pregnant protagonist.
Like Shibata, the narrator of Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night is another solitary woman in her thirties. This is Fuyuko, who is unable to handle the atmosphere at a publishing firm and achieves a degree of independence by working from home as a freelance proof-reader.
Kawakami’s earlier Breasts and Eggs was about womanhood and autonomy in modern Japan; All the Lovers in the Night, first published in her country in 2011, dwells on similar issues in a more compact manner. It has the same conversational prose, loose-limbed structure, and long chunks of dialogue that combine emotional depth with disarming observation.
Fuyuko has difficulty socialising, likes to go on long walks alone, and has no friends to speak of. A counterpoint to such behaviour arising from a traumatised past is the conduct of Hijiri, her straight-talking editor. She tells Fuyuko that she’s heard it all: “how I lacked charm, how I was confrontational, how I wore people out, how I never listened. But those reactions are so common they’re basically a kind of tradition, so when men say that kind of thing, stupid as it is, I can let it go.”
To loosen up, Fuyuko starts to hit the bottle, sometimes from the break of day itself. The quantities of beer and sake she imbibes contribute to her striking up a relationship with an older man, a physics teacher.
In their conversations, he tells her about the qualities of light and the properties of colour. In turn, she informs him that no matter how much attention is devoted to proofreading a book, there are always errors that remain, waiting to be found out. As the seasons pass, Fuyuko is flooded by new intensities of feeling, leading to an ending that’s bittersweet.
In different ways, then, both Yagi and Kawakami’s novels offer critiques of existing systems, sometimes overt and often subterranean. They take as their necessary subjects the issues of women’s agency, loneliness, and control of their bodies. In passing, such works are a reminder that the writer of the 11th century The Tale of Genji, often referred to as the world’s first novel, was also a Japanese woman, Murasaki Shikibu.
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