Diary of a Void
I liked the imagery of this story a lot. I think the strongest parts of this reading is when she's in the office. There's such great descriptions of her workspace that I could imagine the office exactly and how each person interacted with Shibata. I think it's ironic how her only positive interactions with coworkers comes after she reveals she's pregnant, and I think the cups could potentially symbolize the treatment of women in the work place? They're used until no longer needed and the responsibility of them is pushed onto other people when it comes time to get rid of them (HR). That could be a stretch, but that's what I took away. Overall I liked the first portion, but when the time jumps, I got really confused to be honest.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder
I thought the husband's insecurity was the most interesting thread in this one. There's that moment where she's basically scripting something in her head to make him feel better about himself, and I liked that we get to watch her do that work silently. What got me though is how his insecurity ends up planting itself in her. He keeps putting the image of her being into the fighters in her head until it actually starts getting to her, and then she realizes she kind of is into the bodybuilders, which surprises her. I think that says something about how she assumes things about herself before she's even tried them. So when she joins the gym and starts asking around for advice, it felt less like a hobby and more like a way to avoid sitting with the insecurities she found in herself, plus the ones he pushed onto her. She hides it from him, which honestly tracks since he's so holed up in his work, but it also means nobody's checking her on it, and she gets addicted to it in a way that's a little freakish. Everyone else notices and comments on how weird it's gotten, and he still doesn't, which I think is the point. I did like the happy ending where he finally sees her, I feel the situation could've easily gone the other way, and the tie-back to the rollercoaster and the Yorkie at the end was satisfying.
The Woman in the Purple Skirt
The thing that hooked me right away was how much the Woman in the Purple Skirt resembles the narrator, so much so that I kept wondering if they could actually be sisters, or if that's just the narrator wanting a connection that badly. There's this whole stretch where she's trying to place why the woman looks so familiar, and she just picks her apart: the hair, the face, guessing her age, the clothes, the way she eats her cream bun. I liked those descriptions a lot, but they also made the woman feel almost unreal to me, because she never reacts to any of it. People move out of her way, smile at her, look down, and none of it seems to land on her. And because she's so constantly out in public, people treat her like she's part of the scenery, kids touching her as part of their games, her designated chairs, everyone assuming she must be unemployed. Meanwhile the narrator is essentially stalking her, which she frames as wanting to be friends, but the observations are pretty insulting when you look at them. The woman is applying to jobs constantly, and the narrator's take is basically "well obviously she didn't get the waitressing job, she drinks out of the park water fountain." Then she follows her to the new job and seems genuinely thrown to see her pandering to her supervisor with that ingratiating laugh, like the mystery woman turning out to be ordinary ruins something. What's strange is how thin the narrator herself feels by comparison, with the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan barely registering to anyone, which I think is exactly why she can't stop looking.
The Most Boring Red on Earth
Honestly, I don't have much to say about this one, it was short, but it was my favorite out of all the readings. I loved the descriptiveness of it, I think it really highlights the main character's attempt at hiding their true feelings about her period. I really liked this part specifically: "'I want the women in my work to be fully fleshed out as characters, so when I'm writing my scripts I make sure to decide what age they got their first period,' it made her smirk This guy thinks women = periods."
Breast and Egg
This was the only story I knew about prior to the class and I was really excited to read it. What I will say about the excerpts is that it is a little hard to understand and I usually find myself trying to put the pieces together at first reading. However, on second reading, I definitely build a better understanding of the characters and the themes. Opening on Natsu finally paying off her student loans after twenty years set the tone for me. I liked the conversation with her sister Maki, who's 48 and working at Chanel over in Shobashi, which I think is a bar? Maki's the one with the daughter, Midoriko, who's heading to college now. There's this thread about how Maki had lost a scary amount of weight the summer before and has since gained it back to something healthy, and then she turns around and accuses Natsu of being spacey, which felt pointed to me given Natsu keeps saying summer feels like it's repeating itself. Midoriko is off on a trip with her boyfriend Haruyama, and I liked that their relationship is the one healthy thing in the book two years in, and they get each other precisely because she's not a typical girl and they're both so different.
The Naruse material is where it got heavy. When she was young they were each other's entire worlds and she couldn't picture a future without him, very much first-love naivety. Then he cheats and tries to explain it away by saying he only wanted to sleep with the woman, it wasn't love, as if that helps. What got me is that she stops enjoying sex with him afterward but is too scared to say so, and decides that as a woman her job is just to go along with what he wants. Sex becomes this passionless thing she doesn't connect to love at all, and when they finally break up at 23, we learn that's why. Then he calls her years later, married with kids, and asks if she's even present in the conversation, the same thing Maki said, which I don't think is an accident. He talks about Japanese politics, which doesn't sound like the Naruse she knew at all, criticizes her magazine column, gets weirdly angry that her efforts against the government aren't enough, and then tells her she's better off alone because she can't make herself like something she doesn't actually like. If that's a reference to the sex, he's a genuine piece of work. I'm still a little tangled on whether Natsu and Makiko are childhood friends through their mothers, but her looking into sperm donation at the end felt earned after all that.
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