The Strange Audacity of Faking a Big Life Moment

In Japan’s recent past, the task of preparing and serving tea frequently fell to female office workers, sometimes called ochakumi (“tea-pourers”). My mother remembers observing older tea-pourers in the 1970s teaching younger ones how to do it correctly, preparing the young women for how they would someday serve their husbands. Although there has been strong feminist pushback against this practice, gendered expectations about who serves drinks in the workplace have persisted. So perhaps it is significant that in Emi Yagi’s novel, Diary of a Void (translated by David Boyd and Lucy North), it is coffee-cleanup duty that causes Shibata, the office worker at the center of the story, to snap and tell her colleagues that she can’t wash the cups due to her morning sickness.

Except that Shibata isn’t pregnant. It’s a lie. Consciously or unconsciously,