The Woman In The Purple Skirt – Natsuko Imamura

The Woman In The Purple Skirt is a short, strange novel – nothing like the cozy, saccharine Japanese books that have topped the bestseller lists in recent years. If you want a sweet story where characters become unlikely friends, or a cat leads someone to a life-changing realisation, you’re going to want to look elsewhere.

My edition was translated from the original Japanese into English by Lucy North.

The titular character, The Woman In The Purple Skirt, is somewhat of a local celebrity. She’s an enigma, engaging with almost no one in her (unnamed) inner-city neighbourhood, but she can be seen several times a week quietly savouring a cream bun on a specific park bench.

Unbeknownst to her, she is being closely observed by our narrator, a woman who refers to herself as The Woman In The Yellow Cardigan. The Woman In The Yellow Cardigan knows where The Woman In The Purple Skirt lives, works, does her grocery shopping – and she says she wants to be friends, so she starts engineering opportunities for them to interact.

There’s no lazy exposition or foreshadowing in The Woman In The Purple Skirt. The prose is very tight, almost to the point of obfuscating the plot. Even by the halfway point, I had no idea why the narrator was so obsessed with The Woman In The Purple Skirt, or where their story was headed. It made for quite a disturbing read (like Caroline Kepnes’s You, if you had no idea why Joe was stalking Genevieve).

There’s nothing explicitly sexual or predatory in The Woman In the Yellow Cardigan’s observations, but it’s undeniably unsettling. At times, she seems envious of The Woman In The Purple Skirt, at others resentful, at others again desirous. I’m not sure she even knows why she is so drawn to the object of her attentions – there’s certainly nothing spectacular about her. The Woman In The Purple Skirt is just a gal trying to find her way in a man’s world, in an iconic outfit.

A plot of sorts does play out, with The Woman In The Purple Skirt subjected to sexual harassment and workplace bullying. The climax sees her world collide with that of The Woman In The Yellow Cardigan in an unexpected way. And yet, it’s not a neat beginning-middle-end narrative. There’s no true denouement or clear conclusion. The Woman In The Purple Skirt is a book you’ll need to chew on for a while, and decide for yourself what it all means.

Read The Woman In The Purple Skirt on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Woman In The Purple Skirt:

• “It was kind of sweet in that way. Well, as sweet as a story about a stalker can be.” – Michelle
• “One woman is obsessed with another one, but the story is boring, and makes no sense.” – Grey Fred