Book Review: "The Woman in the Purple Skirt" by Natsuko Mamura

Over time, I have read many books from the land of Japan. Japanese fiction is some of the most incredible, heartfelt and magnificent fiction in the world. You cannot go wrong with a traditionalist family gone awry like Junichiro Tanazaki’s “The Makioka Sisters” and you definitely cannot shy away from Yasunari Kawabata’s mind-bending narratives of the human psyche pushed to the edge such as: “Dandelions”, “Thousand Cranes” and “The Sound of the Mountain”. Reading Yukio Mishima’s “Confessions of a Mask”, “The Sound of the Waves” or the disturbing “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea” is like being on a trip through the less-explored and more explicit parts of modern 20th century Japanese Culture. In our own 21st century we have had great authors such as: Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, Hiromi Kawakami, the great Koji Suzuki and who can forget Koushun Takami - creator of “Battle Royale”. It is not uncommon to say that Japanese Literature from about 1930 until now has been in its golden age. We are witnessing some of the novelists that will go down in history as greats and legends and the same can be said for this newer novelist - Natsuko Mamura.

“The Woman in the Purple Skirt” follows a disturbing literary tradition of Japanese Modernism in which the human psychological state is pushed right to the edges in which the lines between what is ethically right and what is ethically wrong are blurred and in some cases, erased. A woman called ‘The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan’ narrates this novel as she stalks the ‘Woman in the Purple Skirt’ - an ambiguous and often mysterious figure that everyone sees though nobody knows. The language of her following this woman all the way around the city is not just disturbing but it has its own personality. It takes on the forms of protection, of knowledge, of reason and tries to justify itself as our narrator follows this woman all the way to her workplaces, the supermarket, the bakery, her house, the park and other places. It is when the narrator follows the woman to her newest workplace at a hotel where she receives training as a housekeeper that things begin to get out of hand. She sees things and yet, cannot say anything for how could she explain why she was there in the first place? In this cyclical dystopian horror of the modern day, it is not unusual to think that everyone in some way is being followed. But do they know you at all? Do they?

Written with brilliant precision and with an eye for clear and disturbing detail, this book shows us that each part of a novel is important to make the ending worthwhile. And there is no real point trying to guess what it might be because you will always get it wrong. From a tap on a shoulder, to a question from a stranger, from a cream bun to a caramel pot - there are multiple symbols practically pointing you to the ending and yet - there will be no way at all to guess what it might be. When you do read it though, it will undoubtedly stay with you for a long while.

Paranoia, fright and that skin-crawling sensation when something is about to go horribly wrong are only some of the emotions in this novel that may seem perfectly normal with no gore, or ghosts or fantasies of the supernatural of any kind. But in the end, is it not that particular lack of supernatural and fantastical things that makes it all so real? In the end are we not just frightened of the reality of this situation? You should be.