The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura
Review of The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura
“Some people would pretend they hadn’t seen her, and carry on as before. Others would quickly move aside, to give her room to pass. Some would pump their fists and look happy and hopeful. Others would do the opposite and look fearful and downcast.”
The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura (2021). Published in English by Penguin Books.
Nowadays, whenever I’ve been reading Japanese literature in translation, specifically by Japanese women, I’ve found that there tend to be very specific themes touched upon. And so when I was wandering the new section of my library and I spotted this book that I kept seeing on online forums lately, I knew I had to pick up The Woman in the Purple Skirt and experience it for myself, especially because of the claims of how this book was like Murata’s Convenience Store Woman.
And, to be frank, I did not like Convenience Store Woman. But it was a critical examination of women in Japanese society, and, lo and behold, I opened this book to discover similar themes.
What is interesting about this book, however, is that instead of focusing on a single woman, we have the narrator, the woman in the yellow cardigan, and the woman in the purple skirt splitting the attention. While the woman in the purple skirt is the center of our morbid fascination, our narrator herself is representing a different part of Japanese society in the contemporary era.
This is also a really short read (it clocked in at 224 pages), as the English edition is a bit smaller in stature-book wise and the font and spacing makes it seem longer than it actually is. I breezed through the entire book in less than an hour and a half. Which is pretty quick for me technically when it comes to books with these amount of pages.
Anyways, I’ve rambled enough, let’s get into this review.
Content
Our narrator in this book is the woman in the yellow cardigan—we have this presented to the reader in simple first person, so we’re directly into the head of this woman. She tends to be ignored by society and forgotten, but is always lurking in the fringes of the shadows.
Which is how we come to learn about the woman in the purple skirt. This woman seems on-and-off unemployed and always sits at the same spot in the park each day with a cream bun. Her hair is ratty and she wears the same clothes, while she doesn’t talk to anyone. The local schoolchildren have taken a penchant to playing rock-paper-scissors and whoever loses has to touch the woman in the purple skirt.
This is an interesting concept right off the bat, because we’ve stripped these two women down to what they’re wearing and how they appear to the outside world.
The woman in the yellow cardigan becomes obsessed with the woman in the purple skirt to the point where she helps her get hired at the same housekeeping job she has (discreetly, though, by placing highlighted and dog-eared copies of employment books where the woman in the purple skirt can find them). It is here we begin to see some serious stalking of the woman in the purple skirt, who, at first, everyone at work loves.
But then she begins an affair with the boss, who is married, leading to everyone in the workplace hating the woman in the purple skirt and framing her for stealing the hotel’s goods to sell at the local children’s bazaar.
We start to see some class issues here in the book because only the people in charge (who are probably educated, originally from families with money, etc.) are given real names to address them by (along with Supervisor or their title), while the rest of the characters are just cogs in the system, faceless and nameless.
The woman in the purple skirt has always been an enigma, one who stood out from the crowd. Even as she lived her peaceful life with her cream buns, she stood out, people gossiping about her and her origins. But as she takes the housekeeping job and begins to change, no longer showing up to the park, she suddenly is desirable. Everyone wants to talk to her and be her friend.
But as she slowly rots on the inside, becoming more haughty and stuck-up due to the attention, everyone around her begins to rot. She is groped on the bus, which is traumatizing and she no longer takes the bus. Suddenly her coworkers all are starting vicious rumors about her, costing her the brief happiness she had in the affair she held with her boss and leading to a tragic series of events that honestly probably destroyed her life. Which leads to my next point.
From this point on I’m referring to woman in the yellow cardigan as WITYC and woman in the purple skirt as WITPS because this is tiring y’all.
The woman in the yellow cardigan is the master manipulator of all of this. She led the WITPS to the housekeeping job that ended up ruining her life. It was there we learn some more intimate details of this woman beyond the superficial stalking that the WITYC was doing, such as her actual name, her family members, and the tender love she held for the boss. And all of that is betrayed because of the WITYC’s inability to fix even her own life. She thought that by fixing the WITPS’s life, she could fix her own. Which clearly is not true because she actually ended up ruining the WITPS’s life.
Perhaps this is a warning tale about class and sexism.
About exploitation, how hotel workers (not just in Japan) are taken advantage of. The WITPS is given up immediately by the boss, who has used her for her attention and affection but discards her once she is deemed not useful to him anymore. The workers, who are also probably paid so little, also find luxury in, say, the hotel conditioner, but it is a double standard she uses it and is dubbed as stealing.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a very different story than Convenience Store Woman, but I can see how it broadly overlaps in terms of what the books are discussing and trying to tackle. This book takes it to a new extreme, and while it does so, I think that some might be turned off by the sheer amount of stalking that the narrator does. She full-on follows the boss and WITPS’s date through its entirety.
While the narrator is straight up forgotten by society, allowing her to do this, the woman in the purple skirt is seen as a minor celebrity before she even interacts with anyone. I do think this book can be kind of boring once you sit down with it and realize that nothing actually happens that’s exciting for most people, but it’s fun to dig into the gender and social issues that go into the context of it. Worth a read if you have some spare time.
