Diary of a Void

About

Ms. Shibata is the only woman in her office, which means she makes the coffee, clears the cups, and absorbs the ambient sexism of a cardboard tube manufacturer. One day, nauseated by the smell of the break room, she tells her colleagues she's pregnant. She is not pregnant. But the lie changes everything — no more overtime, no more cleaning duty, a sudden and infuriating new respect. She joins an aerobics class for expectant mothers, stuffs towels under her shirt, downloads a pregnancy tracker. The performance consumes her until the line between pretending and believing dissolves entirely. Yagi's debut, winner of the Dazai Osamu Prize, builds its satire on the quietest possible outrage: the only way this woman can be treated as fully human at work is to be carrying another human inside her. The void at the centre is the point.