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アンバランス
「彼女とセックスできる理由を話して」
性的不能だと信じていた夫の愛人は、醜く太った中年の女だった。
専業主婦の日奈子のもとへ、ある日、夫の愛人と名乗る、太った中年女性がやってくる。
夫のユキは長らく性的不能だったはずで、日奈子とはセックスレスの日々が続いていた。
いったいいつから、私たちの関係は、こんなにも不安定なものになってしまっていたのか――。
日奈子は、衝撃のなかで、ある行動に出る。
どんな夫婦にも訪れ得る、あやうい瞬間。
繊細な描写で、残酷なまでにむき出される心の機微を描く。
解説・東直子
※この電子書籍は2016年3月に文藝春秋より刊行された単行本の文庫版を底本としています。
性的不能だと信じていた夫の愛人は、醜く太った中年の女だった。
専業主婦の日奈子のもとへ、ある日、夫の愛人と名乗る、太った中年女性がやってくる。
夫のユキは長らく性的不能だったはずで、日奈子とはセックスレスの日々が続いていた。
いったいいつから、私たちの関係は、こんなにも不安定なものになってしまっていたのか――。
日奈子は、衝撃のなかで、ある行動に出る。
どんな夫婦にも訪れ得る、あやうい瞬間。
繊細な描写で、残酷なまでにむき出される心の機微を描く。
解説・東直子
※この電子書籍は2016年3月に文藝春秋より刊行された単行本の文庫版を底本としています。
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 2, 2022
Unbalance is in itself, an unbalanced novel. It feels like a novel that starts with a climax, spends a majority of it's pages on falling action, and doesn't reach a resolution until the very last page. I would have given this novel 5 stars, but the middle of the book was a bit too difficult to get through.
Mid-thirties housewife Hina and her salaryman husband Yuki have been together for around a decade but have only had sex twice. The first 30 pages fly by with confrontation between the wife and the 'other' woman, only to be followed by the husband's graphic depiction of his childhood trauma. The remainder of the book has very little plot or sequence of actions. Instead, the reader enters Hina's mind to go through her confusion, depression, failed attempts at coping, and self-reflection after learning of her husband's affair. Hina does not know what she wants or what she is supposed to do after this life-shaking event. The author forces the reader to sit through the uncomfortableness.
I'll be honest, it's not a pleasant reading experience to stay in Hina's broken state. She drinks. She sleeps. She hardly eats. The days blur together and time skips happen suddenly. She goes back, over and over to her hatred of the other woman even though she knows she's misdirecting her hatred away from her husband Yuki. She tries to go home to her family, only to find there's really not a place for her there. She registers on a male-escort site and has sex with the escort in an attempt to understand why her husband did what he did. Yuki appears sporadically throughout these days and in some flashbacks. She can never quite tell him what she wants because she has not actualized her own desires to herself. It broke her to know that Yuki would not have sex with her because of his childhood trauma, but he could . That fact is what throws her life into unbalance as she admits on the final page.
It takes an incredibly long time and unending threads of thought to finally say to her husband what she wants. And that's what made the novel special to me. Romance-dramadies often start with a woman spurned and then she goes on this magical self-journey where she discovers love again. This novel feels like the author, Katou Chie, is saying NO to that fiction. She instead presents the ugly reality of broken relationships and how processing them is a messy experience.
Katou wanted to explore the concept of sexless marriage that has been a prominent topic in the discussion of Japan's declining birth rate. Netflix's Japanese tv mini-series Fishbowl Wives also explores unhappy, broken relationships through women having affairs to reach self-actualization. While Fishbowl Wives has men that emotionally and physically abuse their wives or chronically ignore their wives' desires, Unbalance gives us Yuki who is described simply as 'nice'. But Yuki is so clueless to what his wife actually wants. He's not in tune with her at all, nor she with him. This is blazingly apparent when he asks Hina . I actually scoffed out loud when he said that. Katou showed me how easy it is to believe that things will change, all the while nothing changes. Often times, people find themselves in stagnant, lukewarm relationships and the days pass by without change unless an event forces the person to confront their reality. Katou's novel left me with an impression of a fish in a bowl with water that never gets changed and it just sits there, barely existing. Yuki's affair tipped over Hina's fishbowl. Hina is flopping and gasping for air for the majority of the novel. Only on the last page did she become a full, yet broken human who could verbalize what she wanted.
Mid-thirties housewife Hina and her salaryman husband Yuki have been together for around a decade but have only had sex twice. The first 30 pages fly by with confrontation between the wife and the 'other' woman, only to be followed by the husband's graphic depiction of his childhood trauma. The remainder of the book has very little plot or sequence of actions. Instead, the reader enters Hina's mind to go through her confusion, depression, failed attempts at coping, and self-reflection after learning of her husband's affair. Hina does not know what she wants or what she is supposed to do after this life-shaking event. The author forces the reader to sit through the uncomfortableness.
I'll be honest, it's not a pleasant reading experience to stay in Hina's broken state. She drinks. She sleeps. She hardly eats. The days blur together and time skips happen suddenly. She goes back, over and over to her hatred of the other woman even though she knows she's misdirecting her hatred away from her husband Yuki. She tries to go home to her family, only to find there's really not a place for her there. She registers on a male-escort site and has sex with the escort in an attempt to understand why her husband did what he did. Yuki appears sporadically throughout these days and in some flashbacks. She can never quite tell him what she wants because she has not actualized her own desires to herself. It broke her to know that Yuki would not have sex with her because of his childhood trauma, but he could . That fact is what throws her life into unbalance as she admits on the final page.
It takes an incredibly long time and unending threads of thought to finally say to her husband what she wants. And that's what made the novel special to me. Romance-dramadies often start with a woman spurned and then she goes on this magical self-journey where she discovers love again. This novel feels like the author, Katou Chie, is saying NO to that fiction. She instead presents the ugly reality of broken relationships and how processing them is a messy experience.
Katou wanted to explore the concept of sexless marriage that has been a prominent topic in the discussion of Japan's declining birth rate. Netflix's Japanese tv mini-series Fishbowl Wives also explores unhappy, broken relationships through women having affairs to reach self-actualization. While Fishbowl Wives has men that emotionally and physically abuse their wives or chronically ignore their wives' desires, Unbalance gives us Yuki who is described simply as 'nice'. But Yuki is so clueless to what his wife actually wants. He's not in tune with her at all, nor she with him. This is blazingly apparent when he asks Hina . I actually scoffed out loud when he said that. Katou showed me how easy it is to believe that things will change, all the while nothing changes. Often times, people find themselves in stagnant, lukewarm relationships and the days pass by without change unless an event forces the person to confront their reality. Katou's novel left me with an impression of a fish in a bowl with water that never gets changed and it just sits there, barely existing. Yuki's affair tipped over Hina's fishbowl. Hina is flopping and gasping for air for the majority of the novel. Only on the last page did she become a full, yet broken human who could verbalize what she wanted.
Displaying 1 of 1 review