Quirky tale of obsession

Top Of The Stack

1. FICTION

THE WOMAN IN THE PURPLE SKIRT

The Woman in the Purple Skirt is being watched.

She is being watched by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, the eccentric narrator of Natsuko Imamura's novel, who has wanted to be friends with her for a long time.

Hovering out of sight, she monitors what the Woman in the Purple Skirt eats, which buses she takes, and even tries - ever so subtly - to help her find a job, leaving shampoo outside her apartment so she can have a clean head of hair during interviews.

In 2019, the year it was first published, The Woman In The Purple Skirt won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's most prestigious literary award.

This English translation by Lucy North sparkles with a style that is clean, understated and funny. The brand of humour - quirky and absurd - has much in common with Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (2016).

"Whenever I saw her, her hair was its usual mess - dull, dry, sticking out all over the place," the narrator observes.

"I strongly suspected she was washing her hair with soap. I'd once had a part-time job at a shampoo factory, and I still had a fair number of shampoo samples from the huge stash I'd managed to collect. What about getting her to use some of my shampoo?"

The Woman in the Purple Skirt finally lands a job as a hotel housekeeper. Then she has an affair with her boss and gets into some serious trouble, but manages to get out of it in a thrilling escapade orchestrated by her voyeuristic "friend".

Imamura used to work in a hotel as a housekeeper. This might explain her intimacy with some of the things that might go on behind the scenes. For example, doors must be left open when guest rooms are being cleaned, but in the book, the housekeepers lock themselves in so they can eat the snacks from the minibar.

The narrator's observations in the book seem whimsical, cute and occasionally tender. Never does her obsession come across as creepy.

As the book progresses, we realise that the narrator is not just any stalker - she is someone the Woman in the Purple Skirt knows in real life. What, we wonder, does it mean to be close to someone but never be truly seen by them?

The novel brims with that vague, metropolitan loneliness that seems a feature of much contemporary Japanese writing. In the faceless crowd, who else yearns for human connection but does not know quite how to begin?

In a world that was already grappling with a loneliness epidemic before Covid-19, Imamura's book is a timely read.

If you like this, read: There's No Such Thing As An Easy Job (Bloomsbury, 2015, translated 2020, $27.95, major bookstores), Kikuko Tsumura's novel about a woman who walks into an employment agency and decides she wants an easy, mundane job.

2. NON-FICTION

THE COMFORT BOOK

Haig, the best-selling author of Notes On A Nervous Planet (2018) and The Midnight Library (2020), has compiled this volume of thoughts and aphorisms he has found helpful in the past, with the aim of supplying readers with solace in these dark times.

3. FICTION

WE COULD NOT SEE THE STARS

Han's peaceful existence in the fishing village of Kampung Seng is disrupted when a strange man shows up and starts asking questions about Han's mother. He tells tales of his travels and of a mysterious golden tower, which leave Han unimpressed but charm his cousin Chong Meng.

Meanwhile, across a peninsula and the ocean lies the forest of Suriyang, which is cursed.

Wong, a Malaysian geologist based in London, makes her debut with this strange, magical novel.

4. FICTION

SONGBIRDS

"One day, Nisha vanished and turned to gold." So begins the second novel by Lefteri, the daughter of Cypriot refugees who made her best-selling debut with The Beekeeper Of Aleppo (2019).

Set in Lefteri's native Cyprus, the story tracks the disappearance of Nisha, a Sri Lankan nanny, from the perspectives of Petra, whose daughter Aliki was Nisha's charge, and Nisha's lover Yiannis, a poacher who hunts tiny migrating songbirds.

5. YOUNG ADULT

ALMOND

When Yun-jae is six, he watches another boy get beaten to death in an alley without expression.

Yun-jae was born with alexithymia, which means the almond-shaped amygdalae in his brain are not functioning. Unable to express emotions, he learns instead to mimic the expressions of others in order to appear normal - until a shocking act of violence on his 16th birthday changes everything.

Sohn's debut novel, translated from Korean, introduces young readers to an unusual narrator.

6. FICTION

BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY

In 1986 Vietnam, the teenage daughter of a wealthy family flees from her angry father into an abandoned rubber plantation.

In 2010, a young American, Winnie, moves to Saigon. Nine months later, she vanishes without a trace.

Kupersmith weaves together these two missing women across time and space in this twisting, haunting tale.

7. FICTION

WHAT YOU CAN SEE FROM HERE

When elderly Selma dreams of an okapi - an endangered striped African mammal - everyone in her small West German village knows that somebody is going to die.

Even so, the death hits Selma's 10-year-old granddaughter Luisa especially hard. As Luisa grows up, however, she meets a Buddhist monk and falls in love.

Leky's best-selling German bildungsroman is translated into English for the first time.

8. FICTION

HARD LIKE WATER

"Hey, I want to establish a revolutionary organisation. Would you like to join?" As pick-up lines go, this is a memorable one from Chinese satirist Yan's latest novel to be translated into English.

In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, soldier Gao Aijun starts an affair with party hard-liner Xia Hongmei.

They dig a "tunnel of love" in the name of the revolution, but also to connect their homes and facilitate their trysts. They lead up to sex by shouting Maoist slogans at each other. Together, they plot their way into party leadership.

9. FICTION

MOTH

In 1940s Delhi, 14-year-old Alma looks forward to her marriage while entertaining her wild younger sister Roop with stories. Little do they or their liberal Brahmin parents know that Partition will soon rend their world asunder.

10. NON-FICTION

CODE NAME MADELEINE

During World War II, as the British pulled their spies out of Nazi-occupied France, one stayed behind: Noor Inayat Khan, 29.

Descended from Indian royalty and raised on Sufi principles of non-violence, she was a dreamy poet and gifted harpist who nevertheless volunteered to fight the Nazis.

The first female wireless operator sent from Britain into France to aid the resistance, she operated under the code name Madeleine.

Soon, she was the only Special Operations Executive agent in half of France, arranging for her fellow agents to be evacuated and sending messages that would be crucial to the Allied success on D-Day.

She was betrayed and captured by the Gestapo, interrogated and eventually executed at Dachau concentration camp just months before the war ended.

In this compelling thriller that draws on never-before-seen accounts and Noor's private papers, American journalist Magida tells the story of a war heroine who deserves more recognition.