【英語で読書感想文】The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura 今村夏子『むらさきのスカートの女』
Title: The Woman in the Purple Skirt
Author: Natsuko Imamura
Good news! Japanese author Natsuko Imamura’s award-winning novel “The Woman in the Purple Skirt” will be published in English this year. I’ve read a couple of her books and sometimes I feel this author has Western modern literature vibes. So I’m excited to see how this phenomenal story will be received by the Western world.
Synopsis: The protagonist is called as the woman in the yellow cardigan. Her habit is secretly monitoring the woman in the purple skirt who seems to be unemployed, and eats a cream bun in the park every day. The woman in the yellow cardigan wants to befriend the woman in the purple skirt so tries to lead her to get a job as a housekeeper at a hotel where the protagonist works. After the numerous failures, they finally become colleagues but this story is not about their friendship at all. As soon as the woman in the purple skirt gets the job, she starts to have an affair with their boss and things become chaotic.
Undeniably, Imamura has a special talent to depict an atmosphere with a sense of restlessness. In the book, the conversations sound like normal and real, but you can feel that there is something extremely wrong and disturbing. As the story progresses, the impression of the two women changes gradually and I lost the boundaries between right/wrong, normal/abnormal, and sane/insane. What impresses me the most is the author writes such a crazy story in a very simple format. Even when the situation becomes a total mess, she writes it as if she is writing a normal diary, which is astonishing.
I’m not sure which genre this book should be categorized as. The story gives many different perspectives depending on the person so maybe this is good one for book clubs :)
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現代の作家のなかでも特にお気に入りの今村夏子。
この人の作品は海外でどういう評価されているんだろう？
元の投稿はコチラ↓です。