jj’s Reviews > Diary of a Void > Status Update

Why: "...A December birth? Well, I don’t know. Maybe December is actually pretty hot in Palestine. Sorry, I really should know more about you."

Oh.: "Mary. Dear Mary. I have to say it. I have no idea how you did it. I can’t even imagine what you were going through, having a baby with only a carpenter for a husband and a pony or something. I know the angels and the wise men showed up after that, but I’m pretty sure you would have preferred a nurse or an ob-gyn, right? Wait, did you have those back then? God, it must have been really cold, though. ..."

"“Oh, by the way, I got divorced,” then acted like she was about to hang up. Shocked, I asked her to tell me about it. . . . Typical Yukino. It’s just like her to move ahead with things without anyone even catching on. But it’s probably like that for everybody. Yukino’s more open than most, maybe. She’s a good egg."

So weird

The search for meaning: "There was nothing here dazzling enough to describe as magic. No cutting-edge technology. The spell was in the obsession, the relentless intensity. Words summoning more words, making space for a new story to come into the world. Solemnly, modestly, reverently. And inside the core a void. Ready for whatever story was going to fill it."

"No—at this factory, there wasn’t even the possibility of anything going wrong." Assumes certainty which, in how this is written, also adds to the feeling of suffocation. MC wants to experience an error, something that breaks free from the numerous sameness but is doomed to come up empty.

I cant help but think of how manufacturing accounts for deviation from norm (ie. rejected products) b/c no machine is 100% perf.

"It just kept going—rolling on and on.
Somebody save me, I thought to myself. I remembered how I always used to hope to find rejects on trips to factories. A malformed seat belt, maybe, or a book with miscut pages. That was what I wanted to see. Unexpected cracks in a giant system that seemed so unassailable."

Modern Japanese novels on workplace + loneliness in a big city (ie There’s No Easy Job, Convenience Store Woman, and Yagi’s Diary of Void) are like the new existentialist books of the 21 first century working woman. Kafka-esque, if you squint and throw in specific Japanese cultural norms.

Japanese lit is very much a hit or "that was weird" (eg overly metaphorical that I can't really get on board with the grounding in the world-building, or just weird) for me. This one is starting off quite interesting and amusing.