Diary of a Void

Set in contemporary Tokyo, the novel follows Shibata, a 34-year-old woman working at a paper core manufacturer. She is the only woman in her section and handles a host of unnamed tasks beyond her formal duties: making coffee for visitors, cleaning meeting rooms, sorting mail, and distributing client gifts.

One evening, her section head nudges her to clear coffee cups from a meeting room. Inside, she finds cups stuffed with cigarette butts. On impulse, she tells him she is pregnant and that the smell triggers her morning sickness. She gives Human Resources (HR) a due date in mid-May. Neither her section head nor the department manager remembers enough about his own wife's pregnancy to question the claim. She is granted permission to leave at five o'clock, and a young male colleague is assigned coffee duties.

Shibata's daily life transforms almost immediately. She is astonished by the 5:00 p.m. train, packed with energetic passengers, and by supermarket shelves stocked with fresh produce rather than the dried-out remnants she usually finds late at night. She begins cooking balanced meals, taking long baths, and doing stretches before bed. Her pregnancy is formally announced at a department meeting; the men treat her with cautious deference but offer no congratulations, which she attributes to her being unmarried.

The one coworker who takes a persistent interest is Higashinakano, her deskmate, a socially awkward man who always smells faintly of glue. He asks about her health and the baby's sex, gives her a handwritten list of safe and unsafe foods, and is the first to notice the maternity badge she obtains from the train station, a pin that signals to fellow commuters that the wearer is pregnant.

As weeks pass, Shibata must manage the logistics of sustaining her lie. She downloads a pregnancy tracker app called Baby-N-Me, which compares fetal size to a different fruit each week. When Higashinakano remarks that her belly should be showing, she experiments at home with hand towels and socks stuffed under her clothes, eventually repurposing sparkly packing material from a box of client-sent fruit jellies as her first fake bump.

A flashback reveals how Shibata ended up here. Her first job at a temp agency was soul-crushingly repetitive. A promotion at 25 stripped her of overtime pay; she stopped eating properly and lost her period. When a male temp she had placed groped her breast after she told him to bathe, her boss responded with a lewd joke. She signed up for a job-search site that day. The paper core manufacturer was described as quiet, and two male interviewers were enthusiastic about hiring a female college graduate. The job initially felt like a reprieve, but within weeks every unnamed chore fell to her as the only woman.

In the present, Shibata's appetite surges during her supposed second trimester, and she gains real weight. She buys loose dresses and begins walking home from work, getting off the train early. At the end-of-year office party, a coworker named Tanaka tells her it is "hard to wrap my head around" her pregnancy, expressing shock that she has been "getting out there" and "having a life" (74). Shibata snaps back that he knows nothing about her, but her voice does not carry. After the party, she walks through Ginza and pauses before a building with stained glass windows depicting the Virgin Mary, silently comparing their situations as women defined by motherhood. This quiet communion with the Virgin becomes a recurring motif.

Over New Year's, Shibata visits her parents. Alone in the kitchen after midnight, she says "Happy New Year!" aloud, noting it is about the time she should begin talking to the baby. She later tells Higashinakano the baby is a boy and announces the name Sorato, written with the kanji for "sky" (or "air," as in "out of thin air") and "person," preempting a list of name suggestions she has glimpsed on his desk.

Shibata joins a maternity aerobics class at a local gym. The class is far more intense than she expects: The lights dim, a mirror ball spins, and pounding bass drives squats and dance moves. She begins attending multiple times a week, and her body changes visibly. The class also gives her a new social circle. A group of pregnant women who gather after Sunday sessions nickname her "Sheeba" and draw her into conversations about cravings, unhelpful husbands, and incontinence pads. Among them is Hosono, who is due first. When one woman asks what Shibata's husband does, she hesitates, then says he has a normal office job. One Sunday, the women pass around a fetal stethoscope. Shibata helps Hosono position it but declines to try it herself, saying only "Not today" (137).

During a snowy evening alone, Shibata reflects on her loneliness, wishing for "something of my own, something to make space for. Even if it was just my own and no one else could even see it" (148). A factory visit with Higashinakano becomes unexpectedly revealing. While waiting for a taxi, Higashinakano confides that he and his wife tried for years to have children through in vitro fertilization (IVF), that his wife miscarried once, and that they eventually gave up. Moved, Shibata invites him to touch her belly. He does, exclaiming that the baby is kicking. She notes she is no longer using any padding.

Shibata begins maternity leave on April 1. At 36 weeks, she visits a doctor for the first time. During the ultrasound, she sees on the screen a baby that has "taken its own form, a human form. Out of nothing" (175). She cries and asks the doctor to stop, saying she was not prepared.

The physical symptoms intensify: kicks, somersaults, sharp pains. Unable to sleep one night, she finds Hosono outside at midnight, rocking her newborn daughter Yuri in a carrier. Hosono unleashes frustration about her husband's passivity. Shibata responds with her own confession: She is profoundly alone, and she is going to keep the lie because "even if it's a lie, it's a place of my own" (196). Before parting, Hosono asks if Shibata is lying about something. Shibata confirms with a simple "Mhm."

At week 40, four days before her due date, Shibata wakes in the dark to pain and discovers she is bleeding. She silently addresses the Virgin Mary one last time and resolves to make the most of her situation, "even if it is just a lie" (208).

Twelve months later, Shibata returns to work. The office has changed: The unnamed menial tasks are now shared, and Tanaka cuts the baumkuchen, a layered cake, himself. Shibata maintains the fiction of Sorato by following an Instagram account of a real mother who had a boy in May, saving photos to show coworkers. At a company panel aimed at women, she states that she is unmarried, has not told her parents about the baby, and is studying for a real estate exam to change careers. The HR moderator panics and redirects. Shibata wonders if she went too far but cannot identify what she would apologize for. Looking out at the audience of young women in suits, she closes with an internal thought: She would love to have another baby, maybe by the time she is 37.