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Emi Yagi
🇯🇵Japan
Emi Yagi is a Japanese novelist whose debut Diary of a Void (2021) — translated into English by David Boyd and Lucy North — arrived with the force of a genuine literary surprise: a slim, strange, furiously funny novel about a woman in a Tokyo office who pretends to be pregnant to escape the drudgery of being the only woman in her workplace. The false pregnancy becomes, unexpectedly, a space of profound self-invention.
The novel's mixture of dark comedy and genuine pathos, its precise observation of Japanese workplace culture, and its warm sympathy for its protagonist made it an international success. Yagi demonstrates that even in a first novel, Japanese fiction can find entirely new angles of vision on familiar subjects.
