![]() At the end-of-year office party, a male coworker stops talking and stares at a platter of fried rice to prompt her to fill up his bowl he asks to touch her baby bump and laughs it off as a joke before making intrusive comments about her “getting out there.” It’s weird and kind of a shock, the coworkers agree, that Shibata has enough of a life to get pregnant in the first place. Coworkers press her to try various exercises and list foods to avoid, though they still leave Shibata to lug tables away after a meeting and tidy up the overflowing trash. Now that she leaves work on time, Shibata has the time and energy to cook proper meals for herself, take long baths, and watch movies freed from the expectation to keep skinny, she takes pleasure in snacking at work, devouring an-doughnuts and dried sardines “as if life depended on it.” Different forms of paternalism spring up, however. Life as a pregnant woman is initially fantastic. ![]() ![]() “What seemed of greatest concern to my bosses, rather than when I could clock out, was the question of the coffee,” Shibata says, not entirely without bitterness, and this sets off almost nine months of stuffing the front of her stomach with scarves and eighty denier tights (Amazon and Mercari had sold out all of their fake baby bumps). Sensing her chance, she requests to leave the Tokyo office at five on the dot until she gets over her “morning sickness.” Her bewildered bosses acquiesce. As the only woman in her section, Shibata, the narrator of Emi Yagi’s debut novel, Diary of a Void, is expected to conduct general upkeep of the office in addition to her already heavy workload. It’s an experiment: she wants to know if any of her male colleagues at the paper manufacturing company will take over her menial chores, like cleaning out the coffee cups brimming with cigarette stubs after a meeting. When Shibata lies to her supervisor that she is pregnant, she takes pains to note that she doesn’t consider it an act of resistance.
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