This story follows a woman, who pretends to be pregnant to get out of doing something at work, then the false pregnancy spans further into a much longer time into other aspects of her life.

Translated from Japanese, I feel like this story is a social commentary on how women are treated differently in the workforce and even more so if they are pregnant/mothers. This story was weirdly entertaining in the fact that I didn't know what was real or fake anymore.

I would like to read more from this author.

A woman prepares to make coffee for her associates before a meeting. No, she isn't the secretary; she is on the same level as everyone else in the room. Yet, she makes the coffee, sets up the room, and cleans it. Sick of all of it, one day, she comes upon the revelation that if she is pregnant, she can get out of bad assignments. Announcing this to her boss, she no longer needs to do these menial tasks that often fall upon women. The men have to scramble to take up the tasks (even though making the coffee is instant coffee).

The next stages are a mix of her really enjoying life when she isn't saddled with chores from the men in her life. She also has to continue to think of clever ways to stay pregnant. When is her due date? How much can she show? Eventually, the imagined reality gets a little twisted with a surreal ending. A very quick, funny, and illuminating read.

Emi Yagi’s delicately wrought debut novel Diary of a Void is about the allure of alternate lives. The protagonist Ms. Shibata’s imaginary baby is the brainchild of curiosity: what would happen if she left the conference room a mess after a big meeting? Since starting her mundane office job at a Tokyo paper-core manufacturing company, becoming the only woman in a sea of men, she’s been expected to do little things outside of her job description: make coffee for everyone during a client visit, replenish the printer ink, tidy up around the office. Small tasks that, when combined, equal a second workload.

One fateful morning she decides to test if any of her coworkers will take over the cleanup if she doesn’t handle it as usual. Will the grown men pick up after themselves unprompted? The answer becomes clear when Shibata’s section head approaches her, requesting her help with the coffee cups. Maybe it’s silent rage, maybe her patience has just run out, because she lies, saying she can’t take care of the mess because the smell of the old coffee triggers her morning sickness. “And that’s how I became pregnant,” she explains.

Her fake pregnancy lies at the center of Diary of a Void, collaboratively translated from the Japanese by David Boyd and Lucy North, though we’re frequently tempted to forget there’s no baby on the way. Even the chapter titles lull us into a state of acceptance: chapter one is titled “Week 5,” the stage Shibata decides she’s reached after arbitrarily giving the Human Resources department a May due date. The chapter names march through the remaining 35 weeks, showing just how far Shibata is willing to take this fantasy.

There are perks to being pregnant, it turns out, even if it’s make-believe. Shibata always gets a seat on public transit. She’s no longer expected to stay late at the office and therefore has extra time to go to the concerts that she loves and to spend more time at her apartment watching movies. But she benefits most when she joins an aerobics class for expectant mothers. The other participants coax the normally reserved Shibata out of her shell and give her a sense of community.

Her pregnancy deception is conceived in a moment of anger, but we begin to see the loneliness behind it. Shibata feels out of place in her office and bogged down by the relentless churn of everyday life. “The office was a swamp,” Yagi writes. “Not a deep one. But one that let off a weird-smelling gas all year round.” She sees the emptiness of her days reflected in a trip to her company’s paper-core factory, where they create commonplace objects, useless until placed at the center of a roll of wallpaper, holding a blank space in the middle. Yet, weeks later, after convincing everyone that she’ll soon have a child to take care of (while instead she’s finally caring for herself and building a support system around her), she revisits the factory with fresh eyes:

"There was nothing here dazzling enough to describe as magic, nor was there cutting-edge technology to marvel at. The spell was in the obsession, the relentless intensity. Words summon more words, making space for a new story to come into the world. Solemnly, modestly, reverently. The core had to be hollow. Where else was the story to go?"

Her pregnancy, feeling realer to her by the day, reshapes her view of the void at the center of the paper tubes: what was once the embodiment of emptiness becomes a wide-open space for opportunity.

Railing against workaday culture isn’t the book’s sole purpose, and Yagi never allows Diary of a Void to veer into depressing territory. Shibata’s dry observations about her surroundings lighten the mood. A Christmastime scene in which a drunk Shibata attempts to have a heart-to-heart with an image of the Virgin Mary on a tableau in a shop window (“It must have been so hard. Finding out you were pregnant, no idea how it happened, then getting visited by those angels or whatever”) is among the best in this debut. Even the name Shibata selects for her “child” (“Sorato, with two kanji: the first for ‘sky,’ or ‘air,’ like ‘out of thin air,’ and the second for ‘person’”) is hilarious in its wordplay, a credit to translators Boyd and North, who preserve clever turns of phrase and make the fact that this is a translated book nearly imperceptible.

Diary of a Void leans heavily on a storyline that’s been endlessly recycled in sitcoms and Lifetime movies, but what makes the pregnancy hoax angle fresh here is the lack of overwrought drama. Shibata doesn’t pull out all the stops to convince everyone she has a baby on the way—she merely allows people to believe what they want to believe and uses the experience to discover what she really wants out of life. This is a sweetly surreal novel about seeking respect and human connection in an increasingly isolated world.

After fleeing sexual harassment at her previous job, Ms. Shibata's new unexciting job in Tokyo is welcomed until she discovers, as the only woman in the workplace, the expectation that she handle all the menial tasks. As if no one else can make coffee or throw away their trash. One day, Ms. Shibata tells the men in her office that she can't clean up the dirty coffee cups because the smell triggers her morning sickness—as an experiment...because she's not actually pregnant.

This thrilling translated literary work documents the single woman's pregnancy journal entries after the coffee cup inception. As a pregnant woman, she doesn't have to overwork herself and now has time to take care of her physical health. Emi Yagi's subversive debut explores weaponized femininity and questions the value of labor divided by gender. As a pregnant woman, Ms. Shibata can finally take up space.

This review is pending publication for Mochi Magazine's Summer Reading List

What a premise! I was delighted to recommend this on What Should I Read Next episode 336, called "Find your audiobook formula," to a reader who was looking for books to take her around the world, and who also wanted to read more in translation. This was an absolute delight and I was so happy to be able to share it on the show.

A thought provoking novel about a woman who pretends to be pregnant in order to avoid menial tasks at her work. After a while, she seems to believe her own lie and it begins to manifest on her own body. I really enjoyed reading Diary of a Void and the story makes me think about the gender inequality that still exists in many "developed" countries.

I definitely have a thing for Japanese fiction, and there have been so many good stories being published lately so I have been in heaven! Japanese novelists always come up with the strangest, most intriguing plot lines, which are often darkly humorous and relatable. Emi Yagi’s novel Diary of a Void is no exception.

Imagine being the only woman in your workplace. As if that wasn’t bad enough, imagine being expected to not only do your job, but also handle all of the traditional female roles for the organization - cleaning up after meetings, serving snacks to your coworkers, distributing the mail … well Shibata has had enough. Tired of being unseen by her male coworkers and taken for granted, she invents a fake pregnancy to buy herself some much needed R&R. Now that her job believes that she is pregnant, Shibata is permitted to work reasonable hours, and not wait on her coworkers hand and foot. The only problem is keeping up her scheme and making it believable, not only to the world, but also to herself. As Shibata becomes more entrenched in her ruse, stuffing towels down her pants, eating enough for two, and attending maternity fitness classes, the line between what’s real and what’s not becomes blurred, not only for readers, but for Shibata herself.

Diary of a Void is short and snarky, and I loved how Shibata found a way to take back her power by whatever means necessary. Serving up black comedy of a lighter fare, Diary of a Void takes us on a life-affirming journey with a woman who is having her eyes opened for the first time to a whole other world - motherhood - without all of the baggage that comes along with it. The result is a funny, compact tale that will have readers turning the pages to see if Shibata can pull off her great pregnancy hoax.

I really enjoyed this short (think novella-length), propulsive, very funny read. Emi Yagi could really have coasted on the great premise she came up with, but instead we get a well-realized narrator and sharp, enjoyable writing. This book was really original, so it's hard to make an "if you liked X, read this" statement. Actually, I found myself thinking of books that didn't work as well for me (like Halle Butler's novels) and comparing them to this one. This was a little less stressful than the average book I've read that is described as a "fever dream," but still had that surreal quality I read those fever dream books for.

Lucy North and David Boyd are both fantastic translators whose individual translations may be familiar to regular readers of literature in translation. It's a huge treat to read a co-translation from these two! I'm looking forward to more.