Diary of a Void
When I first started reading, the first thing that impressed me was the unfair treatment women face in the workplace. Although Shibata had her own job, all those tasks were simply assumed to be her responsibility. However, everyone’s attitude shifted the moment she announced her pregnancy. So I feel like this section may talk about the gender roles in Japanese society, like how a woman’s personal needs or identity can be respected only if she assumes to have the identity of a pregnant woman or mother.
When I first read the "Week 36" section, I was actually quite confused because the excerpt skipped over a lot of chapters. I later briefly looked up what happened, so it's mainly that Shibata had become increasingly committed to the role of an pregannt mother. Consequently, when she went to the hospital for a check-up at 36 weeks, my question at that point is: if she wasn't actually pregnant, how could a professional doctor didn’t notice that? Therefore, I kind of feel like that this passage shouldn't be interpreted through a strictly realism. Since the novel is narrated entirely from Shibata’s first-person perspective, what we see isn't necessarily real fact, but rather the view she experiences it. I interpret the part of ultrasound mean that the novel is no longer asking us to determine whether she is "truly" pregnant,but instead, it is talking about a state where Shibata’s personal reality has merged with objective reality. The lie had been repeated for so long and believed by so many that, in the end, she herself had stepped into the world created by that very lie.
So inaddition, I think another theme of this novel mightbe that what exactly is reality in our society or cognitive world? In the novel, the statement "I’m pregnant" was clearly a lie, but, once uttered, it was believed by everyone. So society, everyone, and even herself began to treat her as a real pregnant woman. In other words, while the child may never have existed in a biological sense, it might have already generated a real social and psychological existence.
While writing this blog post, I was also reminded of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. I haven't actually read or study Judith Butler's theory, nor do I have a background in philosophy. But I’ve noticed some of these ideas through videos. Therefore, what follows is just some of my own thoughts or associations. Back to this theory, althrough it is about gender, but I think the concept of how identity is formed through constant repetition is interesting. In my own understanding, an identity feels stable and natural to us not necessarily because it exists fully formed from the start, but because we continually reinforce it through language, actions, social norms, and the others' expectations that placed upon us. For instance, society dictates how a "mother" or a "pregnant woman" should how to live and behave, so as you repeatedly follows to do these behaviors, that identity becomes increasingly stable, and even comes to feel increasingly "natural." That is why I was led to associate with the changes Shibata underwent between Week 14 to Week 36. Where she began to live more and more seriously as a pregnant woman. In other words, she didn’t suddenly came to the state as week 36. It is rather a long period, she repeatedly performed the actions expected of a pregnant woman. This repetition gradually transformed that role from an act or performance into her own sense of this social indentity. Finally, this reminds me of a famous quote by Wittgenstein it is about: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Which reminds me about that language may not necessarily be able to directly alter the physical world, but it can seriously shape how we organize and understand the world we see. (This paragraph is all based on some daliy video that I watch, so this part might be quite inaccurate.)
The Lonesome Bodybuilder:
My first impression is that although her husband cannot simply be said to be a purely bad person, but truely have some serious problems in this relationship. I feel that although he may not have directly meant it, but has long been belittling the narrator or pointing out her shortcomings. But he is also a very insecure and lacking self-confidence person. So the husband very needs his wife to "see" him, but he himself is not "seeing" her at all. I don’t know if this kind of marriage relationship was common in Japan at that time, like in the beginning, the husband initially pursued his wife, but after many years of marriage, the relationship gradually became a similar to the situation in the novel. But I think at least in many films, TV shows, or literature that I have seen, especially Chinese works, this is quite common.
Another point that interests me is that the narrator is always first defining herself and then living according to that definition. Take the roller coaster as example, it's not that she's afraid, but rather that she feels that someone like her simply is not the kind of person who would ride a roller coaster. This feels very similar to what's discussed in Diary of a Void. That is, I think identity isn't something that takes shape all at once, rather, it's gradually produced through the continuous repetition of certain behaviors that conform to that identity. So the narrator is constantly performing the role she has written for herself. However, when she later starts bodybuilding, it seems feels like the first time she actively breaks out of this identity. But in fact, she has actually only entered another identity, a "bodybuilder." This can be seen from the story about the dog being bitten to death, which she still hasn't broken out of the identity she wrote for herself, which is that the muscles of bodybuilding are for aesthetics rather than for practical use.
However, I don't think there's anything wrong with people having their own identity. On the contrary, I think it's almost impossible for a person to truly "break out of identity." Because as long as you live in society, you will inevitably be placed into various relationships and categories, which even "I'm someone who doesn't like being defined" itself becomes a kind of identity. So I think the only problem is that the novel's narrator always turns identity into a kind of prescription, but a person is complex contradictions composed of complex identities and various things. Lastly,there are some philosophical discussion that comes to mind (though it may not have much to do with this novel). The philosopher Sartre had a theory called "bad faith." Simply is that, people pretend to be a fixed thing in order to escape freedom, because admitting "I could actually choose otherwise" also means you have to bear the responsibility for your choices.
Woman in the Purple Skirt:
To be honest, I didn't quite understand what it was trying to express, possibly because only the beginning part was excerpted. So far, the only impression it's given me is that the truly strange person isn't the woman in the purple dress, but rather the narrator. And then, although the woman in the purple skirt is very marginal in society, but she is visible. However, the narrator is the truly invisible person. Beyond that, I don't really have any particular thoughts about this novel, at least not up to this point.
The Most Boring Red on Earth：
I'm actually not very familiar with this topic, so I probably don't have any particularly deep insights. I think in the book, the protagonist has to go to school, work, and all those tired stuff every day. Whether her body hurts, whether she's tired, whether her period is uncomfortable, seem to be not important matters, which as in the novel it says, "She had fully imbibed society's maxim that it was more important to not cause those around you any bother than it was to take care of your own body." So I feel this might perhaps be a story about the protagonist gradually coming to re-understand or re-examine her own body.
Breasts and Eggs：
To be honest, I'm not very familiar with this novel's subject, or with women-related subject in general, so rather than discussing things like women and society, I'd rather talk about some biological perspective (I've only studied biology and psychology in high school, so some of this is stuff I looked up online). I think the point in the book that I'd most like to discuss is that Natsuko realizes that love, sex, partnership, and reproduction are actually four different part, and are not absolutely bound together. From a biological standpoint, its kind of true, which love isn't a single hormone, it's more like there are several partially overlapping, partially independent systems in the human brain. It’s too complicated so I won't go into detail here, but it's true that sex, romantic love, and attachment don't completely overlap biologically. The second point is from an evolutionary perspective: why do humans have pair bonds? From the standpoint of reproductive efficiency, there originally shouldn't have been any concept of a partner, but the problem is that human children are too hard to raise. So because the cost of human reproduction is especially high, it required two adults to form a relatively stable cooperative relationship, maybe this can explain the partner relationship that humans first evolved. Third, I'd like to discuss why there is so-called "love," that is, why humans become fixated on choosing one specific person. From an evolutionary perspective, one explanation is that choosing a mate is a very high-risk things, which because humans live long, the cost of child-rearing is high, and social relationships are complex, so this is a very effective mechanism for concentrating resources.
So in summary, sex, romantic love, and attachment have never been a single integrated module since the beginning of humanity, though in early times they were indeed highly correlated. But with changes in social systems and economic structures, technological breakthroughs (such as achieving sex without reproduction and reproduction without sex), and humans' continuous ability of self-reflection, these originally highly correlated systems have gradually become less correlated, or increasingly able to operate independently of one another.
Finally, I'd like to mention the concept that nowadays people really like to bring up, Platonic love. Which many people might say that Natsuko is so-called Platonic love. But strictly speaking, that's not quite right. What Plato actually proposed is that love is a "ladder of love," meaning that physical desire can be the starting point of love, but through a gradual process it evolves into a pursuit of "Beauty itself." However, Natsuko is someone who can actually love a person very deeply but has no corresponding sexual desire. So strictly speaking, it's not the same thing as the Platonic love that Plato orignially proposed.
Naked:
When reading this novel, there's actually quite a lot of stuff that could be discussed, but the only thing I wanted to write about in this blog, which may be quite off-topic, is Izumi's state when facing "free time." In short, after losing her job, Izumi has time and money that she can almost freely dispose of, but she finds this freedom empty and painful. But for me, there's a strong sense of irony in this. I lived in China before university, so the state Izumi is described as being in in the novel is almost completely the opposite, and extremely ironic compared to the Chinese social environment. In China, though this description may be a bit exaggerated, I think most people have no freedom or choice at all through their entire lives. From elementary school, middle school, high school to the college entrance exam, educational competition can be extremely severe, and some schools even adopt extremely strict management methods, with students' daily study, sleep, rest, and life all highly regimented. I can say with certainty that many Chinese elementary school students are under much more study pressure than I am now. I have a friend who went through this traditional Chinese education system, and from his description, the management style in high school was absolutely stricter than a prison, they had absolutely no relaxation time, even six hours of sleep a day was a luxury. Going further, after leaving school and entering the workforce, people still doesn't have the right to freely choose. Most of people works jobs they don't like, struggling desperately under financial pressure. 996 (working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week) is the norm, and most people's dream is to retire and achieve financial freedom. Yet this is exactly the life Izumi already has but feels pain over. So I'm not trying to criticize Izumi, nor do I think her pain is fake, but it's just that, reading this story from the environment I'm familiar with, it's just very ironic for me. Actually, this issue could be discussed further, but it would already away somewhat from the novel itself and would enter more complex and more politicized territory.
Conclusion：
This blog is written a bit differently from the last one. Last time I mainly tried to analyze the novel, whereas this time I wrote a lot more, even a bit wordy and off-topic. It's more like an things that I just write about the topics I wanted to discuss, so I don't know if that's okay.
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