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Natsuko Imamura (author), Lucy North (translator), The Woman in the Purple Skirt, Penguin Books, 2021. 224 pgs.

Once, I remember, after an exam, having nothing to do and not wanting to take the bus back to my suburban life, I decided to follow a random person through the university campus. I chose the first person who exited the same auditorium that I had just left: a young man with a black backpack who repeatedly checked his phone as he—we—walked to the gym, which is where I stopped following him, because I didn’t have a membership and didn’t want to go through all the trouble of signing up for one. I wasn’t as interested in him as, for instance, James Stewart’s Scottie was in Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or Marcel was in Albertine in Proust’s The Captive—those iconic romanticisations of stalking—since my desire to know my subject—initially general then arbitrarily made specific—was dejected by the first limitation imposed upon it.

But at that moment, standing outside the gym, watching the black backpack getting smaller and smaller in the distance, I understood why people behaved in such a way: wishing to lose yourself in surveilling the life of another, a destructive behaviour which can be made sense of if love, envy and the desire to be/become that person so you no longer had to see/be seen as yourself is at play. In Proust and Signs, Gilles Deleuze writes that to fall in love “is to individualise someone by the signs he bears or emits. It is to become sensitive to these signs, to undergo an apprenticeship to them. It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation.” To fall in love then, in a sense, is to write a novel.

In The Woman in the Purple Skirt—a short novel by Natsuko Imamura and translated by Lucy North—the narrator—a woman who calls herself “The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan” and is later revealed to be Supervisor Gondo—has fallen in love with the titular subject to the point of obsession: “I want to become friends with the Woman in the Purple Skirt. But how? That is all I can think about. But all that happens is that the days go by” and the pages of silent interpretation accumulate, wherein, day after day, she gets closer to realising her dream.

Will they or won’t they meet, I wondered for a long time reading this book, since that distance between them is pleasantly frustrating, the very distance that enables the narrator to be productive with her anxiety, to weave a propulsive narrative from it, featuring a sudden twist and a few slight turns. The book’s jacket cover cites Rear Window, Parasite and Ottessa Moshfegh as references, whereas I found it to be in a similar vein to Brian de Palma’s Body Double, Mean Girls and the conceptual art ofSophie Calle, that Imamura, rather than merely being a writer of noirs that explore the persevere watchable nature of the invasion of one’s privacy and theft of their identity, is more concerned with the way marginalised people, who, in simply existing in the particular, peculiar way that they do, subvert norms, stand out and are irrepressibly shunned by society. The most interesting aspect of the novel is the narrator’s animating jealousy rooted in deep identification.

From the outset, the narrator seems to have her subject all figured out: “Less than ten minutes ago, the Woman in the Purple Skirt was making her purchase in the bakery. If I know anything about her daily routine, she always drops by the park.” The common obsessive is drawn to subjects who seem to have set patterns in their daily life, which, as a result, causes them to feel a false sense of control: I know what they’ll do—even though, at the back of their mind, is the knowledge that a deviation will inevitably occur, that an irrevocable change will take place.

Realising it has been some time since the woman had a job, the narrator takes matters into her own hands and places classified ads at the edge of the park bench, the woman’s “Exclusively Reserved Seat”, so she can lead her towards the M&H Hotel, naturally yet staged. Then the second act begins: she gets the job at the hotel, no longer wearing her purple skirt, revealing her name—Mayuko Hino—but, to the narrator’s surprise, rather than falter, she flourishes, fanning the flames: “And what was all this about her being ‘conscientious’ and ‘capable’? That set me on edge…I would never have described her as ‘spruce,’ not by any standard, but how very odd that all it took was for her to put on a uniform like everyone else, and tie her hair back in a ponytail, to all of a sudden start being thought of as ‘capable.’”

All of a sudden, the narrative is out of the narrator’s hands: she can no longer keep with the pace at which her monster evolves; not when she begins an affair with the Director of Housekeeping; or when items from the hotel start to disappear and then surface at a local bazaar—which may or may not be the narrator’s doing, since Imamura raises questions that go unanswered, lending the novel an elusive aspect.The Woman in the Purple Skirt, a loner who seemed to have no attachments to the world, as soon as she enters into a new environment, undergoes a drastic change: rapidly and successfully assimilates: “I found it impossible to tell her apart from them. It was amazing how the Woman in the Purple Skirt had succeeded in making herself exactly like everyone else—in her hairstyle, her clothes, the way she carried herself, her facial expressions, and even the way the master key at her hip jangled on its chain when she shook with laughter.” But then gossip and rumours undo all her progress— “Do you know how much the Director’s ‘little lady friend’ gets paid?”—and she becomes a pariah once again: her period of well-adjustment never fated to be long-lasting. The very jealousy that draws the narrator towards her subject simultaneously repels the subject from any given environment: she can neither have nothing nor everything.

When, at the end of the novel, we see the Director lie about his affair in front of his colleagues and his wife, it is apparent that Imamura has smuggled in a portrait of an immoral hypocritical society that will teach you how to steal, but then reprimand you for stealing too much; to celebrate you and then discard you once you garner too much attention. The fate of the Woman in the Purple Skirt reminded me of a line from Ling Ma’s short story “Office Hours”: “Enid gets to disappear, but most of us can’t do that. Most of us are like Rebecca: we’re critical of the world but we still have to live in it.” The only way that the narrator can bear to live in this world is if she can be seen: “I found myself being observed by two small round eyes. She was looking straight at me.” She becomes her own subject; but only as someone else: someone whom she can hopefully fall in love with.

How to cite: Nagendrarajah, Nirris. “Obsessed: On Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 8 Jun. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/06/08/purple-skirt.

Nirris Nagendrarajah (he/him) is a writer at the intersection of literature and film from Toronto, Canada. He holds a BA. in English Literature from York University and his work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Centifictionist, TamilCulture and paloma magazine. He runs Shortcuts, his weekly flash fiction substack, and is currently at work on a novel about the anxiety of waiting. [All contributions by Nirris Nagendrarajah.]

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