I have had Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi on my To Be Read pile for a little while. I bought it on a bit of a whim when I was in Foyles one day – to be honest I think I was looking for books for someone else, saw this book and wanted to read it!

Ms Shibata refuses to clear away the coffee at work one day, because she’s pregnant and can’t bear the smell.

The only thing is…. Ms Shibata is not pregnant.

Being a mother-to-be isn’t easy. Ms Shibata has a nine-month ruse to keep up. Before long, it becomes all-absorbing, and with the help of towel-stuffed shirts and a diary app that tracks every stage of her ‘pregnancy’, the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.

Shibata works in an office, and due to the fact that she is the female member of staff she seems to have acquired a number of tasks in addition to her job description that no one else seems to want or need to do. These are all of the small tasks about an office, like making coffee for meetings, or clearing up those same coffee cups. She gets rather fed up with this extra labour and one day, seemingly without much thought about what she was about to say, she decides not to clear the coffee cups up after a meeting. When she is asked about it she tells her coworkers that she can’t stand the smell of the coffee because she is pregnant, and so someone else clears the cups up. She notices that they also start to do some of her other additional jobs, jobs they would have absolutely asked her to do before she announced her pregnancy.

Shibata asks to leave work ‘early’, or rather at the end of her actual working day rather than staying late as she is used to do. She starts to eat better and exercise because she is encouraged to do so due to her pregnancy. She discovers a work life balance. She has more in her life than just work.

Like many pregnant people (I certainly did this when I was pregnant), she downloads an app that tells her how her baby is developing – how big the baby is, what pregnancy symptoms she may expect in the next week or so, how big her belly is likely to get. She goes to expectant mother exercise classes and gains a new set of friends. She notices strangers acting differently towards her – all things that many pregnant women experience.

The only thing is that Shibata isn’t actually pregnant!

You find yourself reading the book both recognising many things that Shibata is going through, her experience as a pregnant person is quite recognisable, and also wondering how she can get away with it. How long can she keep this going? What will happen when she doesn’t actually have the baby?

This is a really good and enjoyable book. Shibata is deluding herself about her situation. She knows full well that she isn’t actually pregnant. She does her research about her ‘pregnancy’, and goes with it. She is not suffering any sort of mental health crusade, or any crusade at all really – while this starts out as a book that could be about how women are treated both when they are pregnant and not, it is not an idealistic book. It is a book about Shibata’s experience with this pregnancy and how it affects her life. It is about how her relationships, both in work and out of work, change through this pregnancy.

I really enjoyed the book, and despite the fact that she is effectively lying to everyone throughout the book, I really liked Shibata. I would absolutely recommend this book and would give it 4 out of 5 stars.