What's the attraction of the Woman in the Purple Skirt?

 Unlike much recent Japanese fiction in translation—The Factory, Terminal Boredom, Slow Boat—The Woman in the Purple Skirt takes place in a recognizable, relatively realistic if unnamed Japanese city. 

It begins, “There’s a person living not too far from me known as the Woman in the Purple Skirt. She only every wears a purple-colored skirt—which is why she has this name.” The entire story is narrated by a woman who (mostly) identifies herself as The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan.

The book’s narrator, who seems to have no family or close friends, becomes obsessed by the Woman in the Purple Skirt. They both sound as if they are in their late twenties or early thirties and are single. The Woman in the Purple Skirt commands a bench in a neighborhood park and disappears periodically from the park, presumably to work.

The Woman is a neighborhood fixture and indulges the children who screw up the nerve to tap her on the shoulder and run away, a game we sense the narrator finds charming while envying the Woman’s easy relations with the children.

The narrator plants an employment magazine where the Woman in the Purple Skirt will find it. She’s turned down a page and circled a listing, and after a few attempts to nudge the Woman toward the job, she finally takes the hint. She’s interviewed and is hired as a hotel housekeeper at the same hotel in which the narrator works.

The narrator had hoped that working together would enable her to be closer to the Woman, but it doesn’t work out. “The day after she completed her training, the Woman in the Purple Skirt was assigned to the thirtieth floor, where TV celebrities and idols often stayed. Each floor had specific cleaning teams, which meant I could hardly ever just pop by to see her. It was now extremely rare that I caught sight of her at work. In recent weeks, I was more likely to be able to get an idea of how she was doing from my sightings of her in the park and on the shopping street.”

Until the end of the book, the narrator stays as close to the Woman as she can—close enough to covertly pat the Woman’s butt and tweak her nose on a packed bus—but does not try to make friends. She notices the hotel’s gift chocolates the Woman shares with the children, the smell of the shampoo the hotel stocks in the bathrooms, the rides to work their boss begins to give the Woman.

With the narrator we watch the children play in the park, listen to the talk among the hotel employees, follow the Woman’s moods from a distance. All is not well at the hotel. The manager announces,  “Ten bath towels, ten hand towels, five bath mats, ten sets of cups and saucers, five wineglasses, five champaign glasses, and three teapots . . .. It’s not clear whether these items were taken by hotel guests, or whether they have bon missing within the hotel itself. . . .” Suspicions are raised. Gossip spreads.

Midway through the book I began to wonder where is all this daily minutia going? I’m not going to spoil it for you and tell you where it does go, but hang on for the ride. It’s terrific.

Natsuko Imamura was born in Hiroshima in 1980 where she attended high school. She later moved to Osaka to attend university. She wrote her first story, a novella, while working a temporary job. It won the 26th Dazai Osamu Prize in 2010. In 2017, Imamura received the 5th Kawai Hayao Story Prize for her 2016 book Ahiru, which was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize but did not win. Her next book was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize and also lost. In 2019, after her third Akutagawa nomination, she finally won with The Woman in the Purple Skirt. 

The Asahi Shimbun reports that after graduating college Imamura got a part-time job as a hotel housekeeper in Osaka. “She enjoyed the job of cleaning the hotel and she thought it was right for her. One she was told, ‘You should rest tomorrow,’ and she decided to write a novel. She began writing in a messy notebook that was in her house.” It became her prize-winning Koko Amiko, published when she was 29 years old. 

The Woman in the Purple Skirt is the first of Imamura’s four books to be translated and I would not be surprised to learn that the translator Lucy North (who is not credited on the cover—shame!) is hard at work on one or more of the earlier books. If they are as engaging and thought-provoking as The Woman in the Purple Skirt, I look forward to reading them.