CBR15 Passport – set in Japan
Shibata is a lonely office worker, doing a rather forgettable job for a paper products company. In her office – and maybe in yours, too – she’s one of the only women, and so in addition to her job she is also expected to do tasks such as bring snacks to her colleagues when vendors gift them to the office, provide coffee at meetings and also clean the cups after meetings. One day, tired of being called “Cup?”, she decides to tell the men in her office that unfortunately, the smell of the ashtray is upsetting her morning sickness and she won’t be able to clean up after the morning meeting. And thus, she becomes a few weeks pregnant.
The book proceeds from there and goes to some strange places as Shibata and her officemates become invested in her “pregnancy”. She has a life outside of the office, but it’s a sparse one. She enjoys concerts and occasionally sees friends, but because she lives alone and rather distantly from everyone else in her life she is able to plausibly keep this fiction to the office, mostly. But as people around her respond positively, she continues to invest more deeply in this project. Through that, her relationships change in surprising ways.
It bears mentioning that this book is set in Japan, where people who are pregnant have access to paid maternity leave before and after birth (here in the US, I was literally laughed at when I had my first son and told I shouldn’t expect my employer to PAY ME to have a baby, and then I had to use every bit of my PTO and just took unpaid time off to manage returning to work 6 weeks after a C-section, and the million doctor appointments in the first year of a baby’s life). I think there are some big cultural differences in how it might feel to be pregnant, especially at work, for people in Japan versus the US. Still, I understood the author’s point – this is a well done critique of cultural expectations, more subtle than simply suggesting that maternity is the best means of escaping sexism.
The prose here is clear, and there are several scenes that stay with you. It’s an exploration of loneliness and a meditation on gender dynamics. It was absorbing and short enough for a quick read over the weekend.
