The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura

The Woman in the Purple Skirt is a thing that exists.
Did it elicit any particular reactions, feelings, emotions—be positive or negative—from me? Besides a big fat ‘meh’, not really.

This short novel never truly delivers on its premise. After reading the summary, I was expecting this to be a psychological tale about voyeurism and obsession, something in the vein of Patricia Highsmith/Alfred Hitchcock, but what we get in actuality is…I don’t even know. Something that is surprisingly—and disappointingly—vanilla. The narrative doesn’t play its scenario up like say Oyinkan Braithwaite does in My Sister, the Serial Killer. Nor does it succeed in capturing the mind of someone who is spiralling into obsession, as Danzy Senna does in New People (now that is a disturbing read). I was neither amused nor troubled by The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Yes, the narrator is a creep but her creeping is just so…dull? Predictable?
She refers to herself as ‘the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan’ (whether she actually even wears a yellow cardigan 24/7 is doubtful) and she is obsessed with ‘the Woman in the Purple Skirt’ (what kind of purple shade? what type of skirt? no clue). Our narrator is elusive when it comes to her own identity, and we learn virtually nothing about who she is, what motivates her, or why she is so fixated on this random woman. ‘The Woman in the Purple Skirt’ seems rather unremarkable, one could say even a bit of a nonentity. Maybe our narrator finds this woman’s ‘undefinedness’ inviting or relatable? I don’t know. Anyhow, without making herself seen or known our ‘clever’ protagonist manipulates the Woman in the Purple Skirt into applying for a job as a housekeeper in the very hotel she works at. Once her ‘prey’ begins working there our narrator can watch all the more closely. She observes her progress in the job, whether she gets on or not with their colleagues, what type of worker she is. Our MC spends most of the remaining narrative spying on the Woman in the Purple Skirt (is she allowed to wear a purple skirt at work? seems unlikely) and overhearing her colleagues gossiping about this new recruit. That no one seems to notice that this person—who is possibly wearing a bright yellow jumper—is always lurking about does seem unlikely, but then again it seemed to kind of fit in with the almost-but-not-quite absurdist quality of this story.
Nothing of note really happens. There are no interesting dynamics going on, nor do our main women feel particularly fleshed out. The story trudges on, with most scenes now seeming to take place at this hotel. Towards the end there is this rather anticlimactic scene that is meant to serve as this big moment but…it just felt flat. I wish the narrative had either embraced a sillier, more absurdist, tone or that it had been more fully committed to being a disquieting psychological tale about obsession, jealousy, ‘doubleness’. What we get instead is a fairly formulaic and painfully bland concoction that is neither here nor there. The Woman in the Purple Skirt does not make for a particularly quirky or suspenseful read and I will likely forget all about its existence in the next following days. I am sure that others readers will have more positive thoughts on this novel so I recommend you check their reviews out.

my rating: ★★½

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