Review | A humdrum office worker longs for the unknowable, so pretends she is pregnant, in Emi Yagi’s keenly observed debut novel Diary of a Void
- In Emi Yagi’s debut novel, her protagonist pretends to be pregnant to get out of menial tasks at work, a male-dominated place where she is the eternal underling
- What follows is a keenly observed dissection of everyday tedium and terror – reminiscent of TV’s The Office. Ultimately, it’s a story of loneliness
“So this is pregnancy. What luxury. What loneliness.” So goes the internal utterance of Ms Shibata, the protagonist of Diary of a Void. But Shibata, a 34-year-old office worker, is not pregnant.
The premise is simple. One day at work, she refuses to undertake a menial task not in her job description. “Why? What’s going on?” asks her section head. “I’m pregnant,” Shibata replies. Her inner monologue, the narrative head space in which the book is set, announces on the next line: “And that’s how I became pregnant.”
This big lie kick-starts the relentless machinery of Emi Yagi’s debut novel into being. Winner of the Osamu Dazai Prize in 2020, Kushin Techo (roughly Empty Core Notebook), the book’s Japanese title, alludes to the Boshi Techo, the “Mother and Child Handbook” given to expectant mothers in Japan.
Fittingly, chapters are divided into weeks. In lieu of the maternal boshi (mother and child), there’s kushin: an empty paper core, and a nod to the paper cylinder (for cling film, canisters, etc) company where Shibata works.
The company’s old-school, fifth-storey office space with poor natural light is, no doubt, the reality for many Japanese clerical workers, sales staff and middle management. Yagi keenly describes the details of office life as one who has lived through the tedium and terror of it all: “The office was a swamp […] that let off a weird-smelling gas all year round.”