I thought I’d like this a lot more, to be honest. The topics explored made me excited about reading it (what it means to be a member of society, a woman, a worker) but, God, this book is repetitive. So repetitive that it becomes boring, so repetitive that it made it feel like the author was banging me over the head with “the point.” What sucks even more is that the dialogue in this is also just as repetitive as the narrative. Maybe if the narrative alone was repetitive I wouldn’t have really minded it because that would make sense for Keiko as a character; she masks how socially awkward she is by following a very rigid social code so repetition and her looping behaviour is indicative of that. But, even the other characters were fucking boring. All the conversations between Keiko and Shiraha, for example, were the exact same from their first interaction right until the very last.  

I’m honestly just happy that this book was short so I didn’t have to sit through any more pages of it but, even then, I think this would’ve worked better as a short story rather than a novella.