When I reached the last piece, I suddenly realised that all the stories seemed to have female protagonists, and all left me with a sense of absurdity.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder, for instance—everything felt so bizarre. The story begins ordinarily: the daily life of a married couple. Yet just when I thought the author was merely exploring marital dynamics, the wife abruptly becomes obsessed with fitness. This twist arrives without warning, her motivation appearing preposterous, but it's portrayed as perfectly natural, rendering the abnormal into the ordinary. Her body becomes both the fruit of her self-discovery and a socially “abnormal” anomaly. At the end, she finds no liberation or reconciliation, remaining instead in a state of solitary and contradictory existence.
Diary of a Void continues this tone: the protagonist’s false pregnancy gains her respect and relief, but only deepens her isolation. No one genuinely cares about her as a person; the “respect” she receives stems solely from her status as a “pregnant woman.” And in The Woman in the Purple Skirt, strangeness comes not from the woman herself but from the narrator’s obsessive gaze, which transforms her ordinary routines into something “abnormal.”
Does the fact that these outlandish situations show a typical occurrence show that society pays attention to women's subjective experiences only when they "deviate from the norm"? If this is the case, how should we interpret “strangeness”? Does that reflect how powerless women feel when they have to do something completely out of the ordinary just to be noticed?
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