I enjoyed the humor in Diary of a Void and laughed especially hard when Shibata called to Mary "not as a believer, but as a peer". I felt that the terseness often found in English translations of Japanese writing was actually very fitting for Shibata's personality and for portraying a sense of being fed-up with the current state of how women are treated in the workplace. The balance between the expectations of motherhood/family tending and work/education is so tricky, and I honestly got emotional towards the end when Shibata thought about the women in the audience, “I could see they were driven, and passionate about their future careers, but were they considering having babies of their own, too?” (213). So many women need to make huge sacrifices in their professional lives to give birth or raise children, sometimes even giving up dreams of a higher education, and it really is such a shame. It's also just an extra burden to have to worry about randomly getting pregnant, especially for girls and women who are still in school or at the beginning stages of building their career. Yagi touches on it a little bit with the line: “[Thinking] About junior high and high school students who couldn’t tell their parents or teachers they were pregnant, and ended up giving birth in a bathroom stall…In fact, any number of women on this train could be pregnant right now and not even know it” (37). I remember often fretting about something out of my control happening leading to me being pregnant towards the later years of high school, as I really couldn't afford to have that happen in such pivotal moments in my development. I would also often wonder what it would be like to be born male and not have to think about any of that. So, the themes of this story hit quite close to home (likely why I'm gushing about it so much), and I felt that Yagi did a great job putting them into perspective with this story. I'd like to read the full book at some point.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder was also a fun read for me. The main character had great reflections throughout her body building journey, and I found myself feeling very connected to her and was often emotionally moved by her experiences. One of my favorite thoughts from her was “...gradually, as I constantly tried to compensate for his lack of confidence by listing all my own faults, I’d acquired the habit of dismissing myself” (130); I felt so proud. The husband pissed me off quite a bit, though that was likely the point. It felt like he was only in the relationship for validation all the way up until the very end, and I do wish that his actions had a little bit more explaining (because at least for me, the jump between him being so dismissive with her to them walking together, seeming like a perfectly happy couple was very jarring). I also liked how the dogs were used as sort of parallels to the husband (the yorkie) and the wife (the doberman) and found it especially cute that the story ended with her wanting to get a tiny yorkie. I'm also super glad that she didn't end up getting together with the trainer, and I felt that her managing to reconcile with her husband was a nice, hopeful ending.
Out of all of the stories, I definitely understood The Woman in the Purple Skirt at the most shallow level. However, the ending with the woman in the purple skirt trying to please her manager (despite being a very prominent figure in her town and not seeming to give much care to other people elsewhere), was quite striking. I thought Imamura was maybe trying to convey how so many women need to almost transform themselves to be especially pleasant in the workplace in order to be respected or liked nearly as much as the men. Also, I'm not sure if this is just complete coincidence, but the narrator being the woman in the yellow cardigan made me think of a song (originally in Japanese) titled わたしのアール/"My R" that got popular around the mid 2010's. In the song, the singer speaks about her experiences going up to the roof top with the intention of committing suicide but always finding someone else already on the roof who beat her to it. She convinces a few of these people to turn away and keep living, one who's very short, another who wears her hair in braids, and another who, notably, is wearing a yellow cardigan. It's revealed in the last line that all of the people who the singer convinced to turn away were past versions of herself, and the song ends with her jumping off the roof. There is zero other evidence that these two things are connected aside from the yellow cardigan, but I thought it was fun to explore the thought a little bit; like maybe the woman in the purple skirt is a future or past (or even alternate universe) version of the woman in the yellow cardigan, which is why the woman in the yellow cardigan keeps thinking that the woman in the purple skirt reminds her of someone.
I thought that The Most Boring Red on Earth was a fun story, and I thought it was interesting to think about fully appreciating/seeing the beauty in periods which are a) quite a taboo subject in many places and b) pretty much always experienced and painted as an inconvenience or bad thing. I myself find it difficult to view periods in a good light (it feels like a very inefficient use of energy and almost a liability in survival situations, so I sometimes wonder how natural selection didn't at least make them less frequent), but this story made me ponder what would be "awesome" about it and I thought briefly about how the biological mechanism for the menstrual cycle being so intricate is pretty cool.
Breasts and Eggs also hit close to home for me, as the topic of being sex-averse while being in a committed relationship was heavily addressed. I was really glad to see that representation, because so many people who are sex-averse and/or asexual live their whole lives putting up with sex or not being able to communicate that to their partner because they feel that they're alone and that they should have to do it to please their partner. Women in particular, even those who are allosexual, can also often end up agreeing to sex when they don't want it because it's painted as being a woman's "duty" to fulfill men's sexual desires. It makes me so sad to think about it and all of the couples who don't have clear communication surrounding sex.
I enjoyed reading Naked as it gave me an unfamiliar perspective on what it's like to have no responsibilities at all; I feel like I've been busy since the day I was born (with all of the sports and after-school activities my parents put me in), and in my working memory, there's never been a time where I had no responsibilities looming over me. Having no responsibilities combined with the freedom of adulthood is almost unfathomable to me. I think that the question of whether humans are intrinsically motivated to contribute to society or not is an interesting one to ponder/debate, and I found myself thinking about it while reading this story. I thought that Yamamoto seemed to think no, given that Izumi is still excited to have a new thing to waste time on at the end of the story, though that might also just be a representation of her burnout.
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