Short stories. Literary. Weird. Translated from Japanese. Many of the stories feature some ordinary complaint in the life of an ordinary woman – to do with work, to do with a relationship, or something else – that is intertwined with some aspect of the world behaving in some manner that is different than we would expect in our consensus reality. In the titular story, the main character is a store clerk and a wife, and on a whim she takes up bodybuilding. She loves it, she gets massive…and her husband doesn’t notice. In another, a customer in a high-end fashion boutique enters a change room and won’t leave, and the main character devotedly serves this customer for days on end, eventually suspecting that the entity in the stall is not even human. Another – one that has apparently won Japan’s highest literary prize – begins with a woman’s fears that she and her husband are beginning to look identical, and in still another, a woman is married to a man made of straw. The circumstances in many of these are at least a little unsettling or unpleasant, often with a strong sense of oh, well, this is life, let’s just get on with it. I feel an impulse to read them in ways that try to draw out the gender politics of what they’re doing, but I don’t feel I’ve been very successful in doing so – not sure if that is because I’m trying too hard to read what isn’t there, or because the cultural context is one I’m unfamiliar with, or because I’m just not managing to successfully parse the weirdness. Anyway, quite enjoyed it.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.