The Woman in the Purple Skirt by by Natsuko Imamura (tr. Lucy North)
Review by Cath Barton
Who is the Woman in the Purple Skirt? She is a mystery, moving through the town in which she lives at speed and with assurance, never bumping into anyone – ‘avoiding all oncoming people’ – and apparently alluring to the many who encounter her. Only when she gets a job does she give her real name, and even then she says she has another name, which is the Woman in the Purple Skirt. Except that it is possibly only the narrator, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who hears that.
Who is the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan? She, too, is a mystery. She is an omniscient, omnipresent narrator. She wants to be friends with the Woman in the Purple Skirt, or so she says. But if so, she is either inept or disingenuous in her efforts to achieve her aim. She manipulates the other woman, ensuring that she gets a job as a cleaner in the hotel where she herself works, but whatever else follows, it does not include friendship.
The action of the story moves between anonymous locations in a park, a shopping district, the hotel. The language of the narrative is, like the settings, neutral in tone. The translation into English by Lucy North from Natsuko Imamura’s original Japanese gives a strong sense of a world of which the elements are familiar but the totality remains mysterious because cause and effect is disrupted, the line through things elusive. Why the Woman in the Purple Skirt acts as she does – working fora while and then not, for example – is an enigma, and to no-one more so than the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. However closely she follows the Woman in the Purple Skirt, however much she tries to direct her choices (and indeed succeeds in doing so) she cannot control the outcomes.
For Western readers whose knowledge of Japan and its culture is limited to films like Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, documentaries showing visitors flocking to see Sakura in spring, and Hokusai’s iconic images of Mount Fuji, Imamura’s novel does not illuminate the differences from our own culture which we suspect we have glimpsed. On the other hand, she shows that certain traits of human behaviour transcend cultural boundaries, emotional responses to life experiences likewise. While life in the Japanese workplace is apparently conformist, punctuated by formal ritualised greetings which have to be learned meticulously by new employees, the hotel portrayed in The Woman in the Purple Skirt is apparently a more anarchic place, where room cleaners help themselves to coffee and left-over sandwiches, gossip is rife and the (male) upper echelons of management issue stern warnings about misdemeanours but take advantage of the (female) lower echelons as they wish.
It is difficult to pull quotations from this book because its power lies less in individual phrases than in the flow of the narration, the accumulation of days. But here’s one, from the narrator, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, as she is first describing the woman who reminds her of so many others, but who she is, ultimately, unable to pin down: ‘It’s common knowledge that nobody who has attempted to collide with the Woman in the Purple Skirt has ever succeeded – don’t you know that?’ This, dear reader, is your story too, she says.
This book, on the surface about two misfits in Japanese society, is actually a universal allegory, raising the perennial questions: what can we hope for from life, how do we relate to others along the way, and if we get what we thought we wanted, will it satisfy us? And, on a mundane, day-to-day-level, what is more satisfying than a small cream bun? ‘Nom-nom. Crunch-crunch. Yum. Delicious.’
The Woman in the Purple Skirt is published by Faber & Faber, 3rd June 2021