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Emi Yagi (author), David Boyd and Lucy North (translators), Diary of a Void, Viking, 2022. 213 pgs.

Shibata works for a cardboard tube company on the fourth floor of an overheated office. When the story opens, Shibata is four days pregnant. At least, that’s what her colleagues believe. Shibata’s pregnancy, though, is a ruse, a throwaway excuse to avoid the obligation of clearing up coffee cups. As she writes in her pregnancy diary,

What I did wasn’t supposed to be an act of rebellion—more like a little experiment. I was curious. I wanted to see if it even occurred to any of my co-workers, maybe somebody who’d actually been in the meeting, to clean up.

But it’s a lie she can’t retract. And as the story develops, this lie mutates from a playful experiment, testing the prejudices of her colleagues and seeing how convincingly she can create a fake bump, to a deep interrogation of the societal pressures on women and the psychological consequences of when these expectations aren’t met.

The pressures stem from the binaries that women in the novel are expected to conform to: young/old, married/not married, pregnant/not pregnant, mother/childless. Yagi shows these expectations emanating not only from men, but also from other women, her family and herself. These multiple pressures are evident when Shibata’s eyes meet a stained-glass depiction of the Virgin Mary, whom she calls “the famous mother”, which triggers the following monologue:

But listen, I’m doing this thing right now where I’m pretending to be pregnant. I don’t think you’d approve. You’d tell me to stop, wouldn’t you? No angels or wise men are going to come and visit me. I haven’t even told my parents. . . . But the reaction I get at work is pure disbelief. They tell me they can’t “wrap their heads around it.” But what makes them think they can say that? I don’t know them and they don’t know me…

Shibata’s musings reflect the social, cultural, and historical metanarratives that influence how she is perceived in relation to her pregnancy. And while much of the above is speculative, Shibata’s reflection reveals the psychological weight of the layers of judgement and expectation she must contend with.

On one level, there is the pressure to adopt certain roles in a male dominated workplace, such as the pastoral obligation that triggers her lie. But equally, there’s the pressure from other women to behave, look, and even suffer in a certain way. At a pregnancy aerobics class, one woman tells her:

You’re looking pretty slim for twenty-four weeks in. But that’s okay … As long as you eat well, sleep well, and come to aerobics, your baby’s gonna be as healthy as can be!

Ironically, while Shibata’s lie is triggered by her desire to challenge expectations, now “pregnant”, these expectations are magnified. As the women compare tales of how poorly their husbands support them, some complaining if they eat too much and others missing medical appointments, there’s an implicit competition amongst the women to suffer the most. Here, Shibata encounters the intensification of societal expectations; she is encouraged to adopt concurrent roles of victim and carer, and strive to become a perfect mother, all while remaining physically attractive.

Being pregnant similarly doesn’t free Shibata from other binaries. Her unmarried status, for example, becomes more problematic. She reflects:

Once my pregnancy was officially announced, the men in my section made a point of treating me with deference. If we bumped into each other by our desks, they’d let me pass. Every time I took a break, they’d ask if I was okay. But they said nothing else. No “Congrats!,” no “Is it a boy or a girl?” I could only assume that was because I wasn’t married.

As Shibata navigates this labyrinth of judgement and expectation, the novel highlights an almost obsessive impulse to reduce and categorise women, even and especially when neither category really applies.

At times in the novel, Yagi explores how, as difficult as it is to conform to societal expectation, it is often easier than the alternative. This is reflected in a playful anecdote when Shibata acquires a pregnancy badge:

As a result of my new badge, people started getting up and giving me their seats on the train. No, please, I don’t need it, I’d say. But they’d insist, so I’d end up playing along. Part of me wanted to lift my blouse and show them my belly so they could see I really didn’t need it. But I decided against it. That would just make things awkward.

While Shibata’s exploitation of the pregnancy badge is comical, this scene is also works as an extended metaphor. Like a “badge” of achievement, it highlights both the elevated status of the pregnant woman in society, and how this increased visibility also attracts judgement. And here, Shibata’s choice to maintain a lie rather than face the awkwardness of revealing that she isn’t pregnant, reflects the uncomfortable consequences of the attention she now receives.

By spotlighting society’s treatment of pregnant women: the gazes, the overprotectiveness, and the pressure to do it right, Yagi also forces the reader to contend with our own attitude towards pregnancy and womanhood. On the one hand, we feel that Shibata is entitled to exploit the prejudices of the male colleagues in the workplace. We feel a particular satisfaction, for example, when rather than distributing free jellies around the office, she takes one for herself, even stealing the multicoloured packaging to pad her fake baby bump. We read, “the little one under my blouse was grinning away, sparkling in three colours”, and share her childish pleasure. Meanwhile though, there’s an increasing unease in the narrative as she lies to other pregnant women. This unease is not just because we’re afraid she’ll be caught out, but because of a sense that she has illegitimately entered a group to which she doesn’t belong. We read with a feeling that Shibata is somehow betraying these other women, having dishonestly claimed an identity for herself which we, as a society, hold sacred.

Shibata’s own guilt at fraudulently claiming this identity for herself also begins to surface when she encounters a new mother, Hosono. As Hosono discusses her fatigue, frustration, disillusionment with early motherhood, Shibata is forced to reflect:

I’m standing right here with you, Hosono, and there’s no way for me to really get how depleted you are, how exhausted…

While you… and the others were throwing up, dealing with morning sickness, cooking dinner for your husbands even though you were totally drained, fighting back tears while you chopped up some pork or bell peppers, I was at home enjoying a slice of cake.

This interaction highlights both a physical and psychological division between the two women. This encounter causes Shibata to recognise:

I’m so alone. I’m sorry—this has nothing to do with how hard things are for you, Hosono. But I’m always so alone. … That’s the way it is from the moment we come into this world, but I’m still not used to it—how alone we all are.”

While the fact of Shibata’s lie widens this divide, here, Yagi points to a sense of isolation experienced by all women as they navigate these identities, finding themselves fixed firmly either side of a binary.

However, Yagi introduces an extra layer of complexity to Shibata’s identity when she starts to actually manifest symptoms of pregnancy. This process is gradual, beginning in language, as Shibata uses phrases like “since I got pregnant”, but culminating when the doctor shows Shibata her baby on a hospital monitor. Just as stunned as the reader, Shibata writes:

I turned my head to see, and there it was. This little being in the shape of a person. I widened my eyes and concentrated all my thoughts on my belly … The doctor pointed at the image on the screen …

I listened, carefully taking in each word the doctor said.

Head.

Belly.

Butt.

Feet.

Hands.

I muttered each word to myself—almost as if they were foreign words I’d never pronounced before. The shape on the screen became more solid before my eyes …

There was a baby there. It had a place in the world. It had taken its own form, a human form. Out of nothing.

This surreal manifestation is a return to the motif of the Virgin Mary, the “famous mother”, and the idea of immaculate conception explored earlier in the novel. But at the same time, it is a metaphorical exploration of the power of an idea to physically transform a body. The scene depicts a bridge between the idea of Shibata’s pregnancy, comprised of thought and words, and the physical reality of her baby. As Shibata’s lie literally comes to life, this narrative twist points to the power of a perceived or imagined identity to transform a person.

By exploring the power of ideas and expectations, and their psychological and even physiological consequences, Yagi confronts the reader with the impact of society’s desire to categorise and label women. Married or single, a mother or childless, Yagi highlights how women are often defined in relation to these two states. However, as the novel reaches its climax, Shibata straddles this binary, occupying a third, middle space where neither she nor the reader know if her pregnancy is real. The novel’s title, Diary of a Void, is therefore an illuminating choice. In addition to representing Shibata’s initially empty belly, this “void” is the space between categories.

Neither pregnant nor not pregnant, Shibata occupies this void—the middle space where she can exist independently of the two typecast states. While it takes faking pregnancy to create this void, once established, Shibata positions herself inside it and, as a relative outsider, can observe and critique the absurd pressures on women both sides of the binary. As we read her account of this space, her “Diary of a Void”, both reader and Shibata learn more about who she is as an individual as neither state confines her. As she surmises:

Even if it’s a lie, it’s a place of my own. That’s why I’m going to keep it. It doesn’t need to be a big lie—just big enough for one person. And if I can hold on to that lie inside my heart, if I can keep repeating it to myself, it might lead me somewhere. Somewhere else, somewhere different. If I can do that, maybe I’ll change a little, and maybe the world will, too.

The void, which is at first troubling and fraught with uncertainty, is thus transformed into a space for independence, exploration and personal growth.

_{How to cite: Hamilton, Lucy. “Reimagining the Void: Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 20 Sept. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/09/20/a-void.}

Lucy Hamilton is a novelist and academic from Sheffield, UK. Her debut novel, The Widening of Tolo Highway (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), set in Hong Kong’s New Territories, is now available worldwide. She lectured in Stylistics at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, and now works at the University of Leeds. [Read all contributions by Lucy Hamilton.]

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