The novel follows a pregnant woman, apparently in her late thirties or around forty, over the course of a single day and night in Tokyo, while her mind moves through decades of memory. The opening scene is ordinary on the surface: she has just had blood drawn at a maternity clinic. Yet this routine prenatal test triggers panic rather than reassurance. The blood test is meant to confirm practical medical facts—blood type, anemia, HIV, syphilis, hepatitis, rubella, and other items—but for her it becomes a moral test. Her blood seems to contain not only biology but the whole history of her body: sex work, risky encounters, abortions, betrayals, and a deep suspicion that she is somehow contaminated.
She is pregnant by her current partner, Yoshito, a kind but somewhat unglamorous man whose goodness both comforts and unsettles her. He is happy about the pregnancy and wants the child. He tells her he will do his best and that the baby will surely be cute. His response is almost embarrassingly simple, and this simplicity makes him seem innocent in relation to her. She cannot decide whether she wants to marry him or fully accept the domestic future that pregnancy has suddenly opened. Part of her hesitation comes from practical fear: what if the blood test reveals an infection from her past? But the deeper fear is existential. She feels that she has no right to become a mother, or even to be happy.
After the clinic visit she and Yoshito eat together. He fusses gently over her food, urging her to eat because she is “eating for two.” This scene exposes the gap between his tender vision of pregnancy and her alienation from it. She is preoccupied with body size, appetite, nausea, and memories of controlling her weight. Pregnancy makes her body visible in a new way, as something useful, maternal, and cared-for, but she has spent much of her life using her body as a tool, weapon, product, and shield. The ordinary gestures of maternity—mother-and-child handbook, clinic forms, talk of diet and fetal growth—feel absurdly far from the life she knows.
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