As Venus educates Rika in the art of self-possession, we are only moderately surprised when Rika informs us, “I was in love with the marble goddess.” When she abruptly mentions that she and Venus “had sex for the first time”—a dreamy aesthetic experience that doesn’t require Rika to take off her clothes, much less her ever-present raincoat—the shock comes only in the impassive nature of the declaration, a persistent strength of Yagi’s. Prurient questions like “How?” and “What?” are simply elided here.
This knack for unexpected, absurd humor forms the backbone of Yagi’s first novel, “Diary of a Void,” from 2020. In that book, another dissatisfied employee, Shibata, discovers that her life at work improves drastically after she spontaneously decides to “get” pregnant. She does this by announcing her forthcoming maternity to her supervisors and to H.R. She is immediately relieved of her unofficial duties as the only woman in the office—making coffee, cleaning up, distributing snacks—and is encouraged to go home on time, instead of staying late, as she usually does. Like Rika, Shibata begins to take her own needs seriously, making herself healthy meals, exercising, doing exactly what she wants. “So this is pregnancy,” she thinks. “What luxury. What loneliness.”
The catch: Shibata isn’t actually pregnant. As the weeks go by, as her imaginary due date approaches and her lie grows steadily more absurd, we begin to wonder if Shibata is experiencing some kind of hysterical break; the novel slides from straight-faced realism into a kind of earnest speculative fiction, suspended in what the narrative theorist Tzvetan Todorov called “the fantastic,” the liminal zone between the uncanny and the marvellous. It remains in this in-between space as Shibata returns to work and continues to raise her imaginary son, and as the men in the office, denied their learned helplessness and dependence on Shibata, start to make their own coffee. The implication is not just that women are better off without men but that the opposite might also be true.
“When the Museum Is Closed” is enjoyable, but it lacks the essential and cutting ambiguity of its predecessor. Part of the charm and surprising triumph of “Diary of a Void” comes from its proximity to real life: How far can Shibata possibly take this deception? The book works because it keeps one foot in the real world of twenty-first-century Tokyo, a society genuinely made sicker by the lingering presence of debilitating gender norms. Interestingly, Yagi’s protagonists both gain new names once they are freed from the strictures of patriarchal society: Venus calls Rika Hora, while Shibata is called Sheeba by her new friends at prenatal aerobics.
The world of Venus and Rika, though, is vague. They talk in an unnamed museum in an unnamed city. Venus is amusingly casual and surprisingly more street-smart than Rika, despite her centuries-long captivity; beyond the shock of her attitude, though, we learn very little about her. One might think that an ancient living statue might be the most interesting character in this story, but we never discover what motivates her, beyond a clichéd desire to get out and see the world. The novel’s villain is the handsome male curator Hashibami, who wants Venus for himself; a consummate collector, he thinks of female beauty as something that can be revealed and perfected only by the male gaze. Hashibami, who we find out lives in the museum, seems to want both to possess Venus’ timeless beauty and to embody it himself. There’s a rich commonality between him and Venus that could be explored here—who’s manipulating Rika more? But the novel ultimately retreats from these complicating questions. The final message is a little too clear; the fairy-tale setting makes the fairy-tale plot too easy.
Yagi’s books belong to a rising tide in Japanese film and literature, one that suggests men are simply incorrigible, and that the conventional marriage plot is a relic. While in America we wring our hands about heterofatalism or the male-loneliness crisis, Yagi can seem almost phlegmatic in her misandry: her characters are better off with an imaginary baby or a talking statue than with an adult human man. Other examples of this motif include Mieko Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs” (in which the narrator decides to have a child on her own, a choice still unusual in Japan) and Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman” (which contains one of the most repellent male characters in recent memory). Hirokazu Kore-eda’s bracing Netflix series “Asura,” which follows four sisters who discover that their aging father has had an affair, is set in the oft-nostalgized Shōwa period (1926-89), demonstrating how misogyny has long been at the root of Japanese family and popular culture. These are all refreshing correctives to the texts that previously stood in for contemporary Japan internationally, including any number of small volumes about magical cafés, bookshops, or libraries, often with cats on their covers.