Earlier this year, I read Kaeruko Akeno’s novel,「対岸の家事」(Someone else’s housework) because I was intrigued by the main character: a young woman who has always wanted to be a housewife and stay-at-home mom. Shiho finds her days with her young daughter to be lonely as her cohort of young mothers all seem to be working during the day, and the only ones at the neighborhood park are a little girl and her arrogant father, who has taken paternity leave as a test case for the government ministry he works for. Shiho also befriends a young mom next door, who is finding it impossible to care for her two young sons while still working, even at reduced hours. These two initially have nothing but contempt for Shiho’s choices, and yet end up turning to her for help. They in turn help her figure out who is sending her death threats (because of course stay-at-home mothers are social parasites). I enjoyed the book, but I couldn’t help but think that most of their problems could have been resolved if they lived in a society in which people worked reasonable hours. It is this issue that Akeno tackled in her next book, 「わたし、定時で帰ります」(No working after hours).
Like Shiho, Yui Higashiyama has a personal policy that seems very out of place–even unreasonable–in Japanese society: she leaves work exactly at 6pm. Only rarely does she work overtime, even during the busiest times. The president of the large IT company she works for encourages this policy and would like to see all employees follow her example, but Yui’s co-workers have their own reasons for staying late at work. One of her co-workers came back from maternity leave after only six weeks because she wants to be promoted and feels that working harder and later than anyone else is the only way to prove her mettle and keep up with the men—she’s even willing to wash her (male) superior’s coffee cup if it wins approval. Another of Yui’s co-workers has never missed a day of work because she’s afraid that she’ll lose her job in a weak economy, but also because she has nothing to do and no one to be with if she does go home. And Kentaro, Yui’s former fiancé, gets an adrenaline rush from work that is so addictive he can’t resist it.
Yui’s own dad was a workaholic who grumbled when called away to visit his daughter in the hospital, and spent his weekends golfing with clients and colleagues. Her mother even put his picture on top of the TV so Yui wouldn’t forget what he looked like. So Yui’s goal is to get to the Shanghai Bar before 6:30pm, while beer is still half-price (her new year’s wish is for another year of delicious beer). Her ten-year career plan, which she matter-of-factly submits to her manager, is to get married in a year, have her first child (a girl) at 33, take three years maternity leave, have her second child (a boy) at 36 and take another three years maternity leave, and then work reduced hours until her children are older.
The older men who drink at the Shanghai Bar with Yui often reminisce about Japan in the bubble period and how hard they had all worked. One of them shows her an old commercial for Regain, an energy drink advertised with the catch copy, “can you fight on for 24 hours?” The commercial that ran in 1989, during the bubble, shows a salaryman traveling overseas to win contracts from foreign companies.
In 1999, after the bubble had burst, the energetic song lauding 24 hours of work was replaced with music meant to soothe people who had worked too much.
But the “fight 24 hours” commercial was resurrected again in 2007, when the economy had made a modest recovery. It shows swarms of salarymen (and they are all men) fighting to get to work on time, running across highways, swimming through rivers and climbing up the side of the building. To Yui, they look like zombies whose sole goal now is to get to work on time.
This is the world that Yui wants to change.
The plot in this book centers around a project that Yui’s department is racing to complete. The department’s new manager, Fukunaga, had previously run his own company into the ground by winning contracts with such low estimates that his employees had to risk their physical (and mental) health. Kentaro had worked for Fukunaga, and in fact Yui had broken off their engagement when he missed the formal meeting between their parents due to sheer exhaustion from work. Now that both Fukunaga and Kentaro, an unrepentant workaholic, are working for Yui’s company, she fears that they will change her company’s work culture for the worse. True to form, Fukunaga has submitted a ruinously low bid for a project that, through a series of blunders, is approved. Yui decides to head up the project with the aim of showing that it is possible to work hard and still go home on time.
The story of the Battle of Imphal, a disastrous battle fought in World War II that was planned by Lieutenant-General Renya Mutaguchi, is told alongside the main plot as Yui learns about it from a documentary and her father. She is horrified by the parallels between her project and the battle. Although Mutaguchi’s superiors had serious reservations about his strategy for defeating the Allied forces at Imphal and invading India, they were eventually won over by his enthusiasm. Mutaguchi seemed to believe that sheer will power would be enough—he assumed that three weeks would be enough to defeat the British and Indian troops, and thus only allowed for enough supplies for this period. Nothing went as planned, and it was the largest defeat in Japanese military history. Luckily, Yui’s project does not result in any fatalities (although it’s a close thing), but both Mutaguchi and Fukunaga’s speeches about pushing harder and working toward even greater feats were enough to convince otherwise levelheaded people to ignore physical limits.
Despite its serious subject matter, this book is also quite funny and the huge cast of characters allows Kaeruko to present many perspectives. This is the kind of book I’d love to see translated into English—this is a straightforward novel with a conventional structure that is probably not going to win any literary prizes, but the stories Kaeruko tells will draw in readers until they empathize with her characters’ struggles, even if the culture is so entirely different. And isn’t that the goal of literature in translation—to make us feel close to people we will never meet and introduce us to a country (in all its imperfections) that we might never actually visit?
Edited to add: This New York Times article entitled “Japan’s Working Mothers: Record Responsibilities, Little Help from Dads” really brought home for me the need for Yui’s crusade.
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