As she climbed the 2026 Met Gala stairs in custom Schiaparelli, the social media magnate Kylie Jenner paid homage to the statue of Venus de Milo. The irony of attending the spring exhibition as a version of the feminine ideal, half-dressed in a nude bodice and a baroque skirt that sat beneath her hips, was clear to Jenner, whose figure has frequently been subject to scrutiny. But how exactly might the ancient statue deepen our understanding of what remains within the body of the socialite?
This question is posed in a more complex fashion by the Japanese novelist Emi Yagi in her recent work. Yagi’s novels are centered around the secret lives of contemporary women who uncannily cross paths with classical archetypes of love (from Mary to Venus), often watching from the sidelines as these icons stand in the spotlight. Yet it is from the periphery that these concealed figures offer us a unique perspective on the difficulties of femininity and interiority, challenging societal assumptions of the feminine ideal in the process. This review explores the relationship between the surface and the depths of women in Yagi’s prose.
I approach Yagi’s second novel, When the Museum Is Closed (2026), through the contents of her first, Diary of a Void (2020), tracing how she conceives of the many intricate shells and vessels of the modern feminine experience. While these novels have been critiqued for being too whimsical or unrealistic, they finally reveal themselves to be the products of women’s hopes and fears, of the burdens they overcome, and of the knowledge that what they carry is enough.
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In When the Museum Is Closed, recently translated from the Japanese into English by Yuki Tejima, readers are asked to imagine a series of intimate encounters, which take place between two figures of women. But there’s a twist: one woman is made of flesh, the other of stone. One has lived through 2020, the other has lasted for two thousand years. One is a timid young adult navigating her way through work post-grad, and the other is a tired Roman goddess standing still in an exhibition. One is a nearly invisible presence, overlooked by passersby, and the other is a hypervisible piece to which spectators flock.
Yet, on a Monday afternoon, during the museum’s closing hours, the outcast is asked to come before the icon. She’s been hired for the ultimate “dream job.” Its conditions? To speak to this inanimate being in a language that is dead. As they meet each week to converse in ancient Latin, the person, Rika Horauchi, and the thing, a statue of Venus, develop a strange affection for one another. As they do, their differences appear to diminish. They share their inner thoughts, consummate their desires through “aural” sex, and hatch a plan to elope.
Rika’s account of “falling in love” with Venus has engaged critics, who underscore the absurdity of the novel’s plot, where the subject of the protagonist’s affection is an object. Still, others praise Museum’s portrayal of a queer romance, calling it a “tender triumph of weird girl fiction.” What is perhaps oddest about the drama that unfolds in Museum, however, is its proximity to real life. By focusing on the unexpected ties between women from worlds apart, Yagi engages age-old questions of fertility and fragility that continue to define their public image. How far inside themselves—and inside each other—are Rika and Venus able to go? Is the journey to the “center” of the other a means for the self to advance or to retreat?
A “voluptuous figure” in the nude, Yagi’s statue is positioned above a plaque that reads: aphrodite of paliano / reproduction of greek statue by roman sculptor / 1st to 2nd century. Though Venus prefers to be called by her Roman name, the name of her town—Paliano (derived from the Latin pallium or cloak)—is more meaningful. In When the Museum Is Closed, Yagi takes this cloaking to a literal extreme. The novel is itself a multi-layered pallium: a story of a Japanese woman placed before a Greco-Roman goddess, on a museum’s closed day, and which we are now reading in translation to English. The literary, cultural, and anatomical parts of this mantle are so fraught that they seem nearly impossible to uncover. But it is Venus who gives us a point of entry, when she asks Rika, during their first meeting, if she may call her “Hora.”
Legend has it that Venus (Aphrodite) springs from the sea fully grown and arrives on the shore of Cyprus in a shell. In ancient versions of this myth, recounted by Homer and Hesiod, and later painted by Botticelli in The Birth of Venus, the goddess is greeted by the Hora of Spring, who wraps her naked body in a robe. The significance of this vestment is surely not lost on Yagi’s Venus of Paliano.
To be sure, the Venus who stands in the museum is not afforded the luxury—or the discretion—in which Hora shrouds her predecessor. As her interlocutor notes, “the years had given the nude goddess an elegance no ornamentation ever could, and at the same time, wrapped her in the kind of solitude no one could fathom”—that is, except Rika herself.
In a brilliant inversion of the mythical tale of Hora covering Venus, Yagi envelops the contemporary “Hora” in a shell of her own. Rika explains how she “was wearing a ridiculous yellow raincoat over [her] clothes.” Functioning like a “second skin,” the raincoat provides Rika with protection from the elements of nature, so that she can work long hours in a freezer warehouse and not get cold. Yet the defining detail of Rika’s raincoat is less pragmatic: it is practically “invisible.” It manifests to others in flashes of light, while Rika herself suffers from heat flashes.
The only character perceptive enough to see Rika’s raincoat in full is a child. As this young boy whom she befriends puts it: “Everyone wears something. All adults do. I’ve never seen anything as bright as yours though.” As the novel progresses, it is the marble statue of Venus who helps Rika let down her yellow guard, so that it becomes “paler . . . than usual.” The divestment of Rika’s coat, then, entails not its removal but a reduction in intensity, a desaturation: from yellow to white.
When it comes to Venus’s own complexion, the racial and sexual implications of such whiteness could not be more troubling. We see this difficulty enacted when the museum curator, Hashibami, mounts himself upon Venus’s pedestal, coils around her like “a snake,” and scrutinizes every part of her body with a loupe. What is he searching for? Any imperfections that would detract a voyeur from perceiving Venus as the feminine ideal. Let us not forget that, in being exposed to the elements, a corroded marble turns yellow.
In a Japanese context, Venus’s upkeep by Hashibami is particularly disturbing, as it draws on a long tradition of bihaku or “beautiful white” skin lightening. But beneath the pale complexion that Hashibami desires to maintain is a darker myth: of Pygmalion and his ivory statue. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this sculptor “often strokes his masterpiece . . . / speaks to her and holds her” so tight he’s afraid she will bruise. He goes to pray before an altar and begs that a goddess—none other than Venus—“let my wife be . . . like my ivory virgin.” The wish is granted and Pygmalion comes home to a woman in the flesh, “who rais[es] scared eyes to heaven” as he mounts her.
Rather than likening Hashibami to Pygmalion, Yagi extends the metaphor of creation through “the women of the museum’s closed day” (as the Japanese title reiterates). In yet another inversion of a classical text, Yagi removes Pygmalion from the ground and places Rika there instead. It is from this site that Rika encounters Venus herself in the position of the statue she once animated. Rika does not pray but simply sits before the white goddess. And, in this case, Venus has no need for men or gods. As she puts it to Hashibami, “I don’t need an Adonis. Or a Zeus, or an Ares. Or you.”
In making this nuanced shift (from Hashibami to “Hora”), Yagi arrests an entire literary history in which men, who thought themselves better than Pygmalion, memorialized their paramours by turning them to stone. For Petrarch and his posse of unrequited lovers, including Shakespeare, John Donne, and Philip Sidney, there was no poetic conceit greater than that which rendered an animate woman into abstract parts. Her skin became “alabaster,” teeth “pearls,” and eyes “windows.” In the sonnet from which this description is drawn—Sidney’s “Queen Virtue’s Court”—the woman’s eyes are so lustrous that they cause the speaker of the poem to ignite: “Of touch they are that without touch doth touch.”
Touch is the key word here. Taking up this poetic tradition, Yagi is careful to distinguish that Venus’s eyes are “pupil-less.” Unable to meet her gaze or to resort to artifice, Rika makes contact with Venus by other means. For Yagi’s protagonist, the most stylized convention of the pre-modern and Renaissance poets becomes a challenge of self-consciousness. It is her raincoat—and not Venus’s eyes—that Rika must see refract. En route to a library, Rika observes how
Trucks rumbled into a factory nearby and I glanced at the rattling window, where the familiar streak of yellow flashed beneath the too-short drapes. . . . What used to be a ridiculous, blinding yellow was now the hue of pre-griddle French toast. . . . Still tough, but thinner. Like the filmy membrane that wraps around a foetus and keeps it separated from the mother, no matter how intimately connected they appear to be.
. . . I was in love with the marble goddess.
The amniotic fluid (and similarly maternal milky/egg coating) with which Rika associates her relationship with Venus is essential, as it evokes Yagi’s first novel, Diary of a Void (2020).
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In Diary, a woman named Shibata recounts her experience feigning pregnancy, an idea she devises to protect herself from her misogynistic coworkers. A modern “Mary” figure, Shibata becomes so caught up in the fantasy of gestation that she often forgets that she is not actually pregnant. Yet it is precisely from this “void” that Yagi’s meditation on the feminine interior begins. In her later novel, Museum, the question of what remains within the void of woman is amplified, as even Venus yearns to alter her insides, though for different reasons than Shibata: “If I had a stomach,” the statue tells Rika, “the first thing I would do is take sleeping pills. Enough of them so I would never have to wake again.” In a disturbing turn, we learn that in the world of Yagi’s heroines, the way to a woman’s heart is through an empty stomach. Filling it with babies, or with pills, will not allow her to reach the depths of her desire.
When the Museum Is Closed thus exceeds its categorization as a work of “absurd fabulism” and “absurd humor” and moves into the realm of what Julia Kristeva calls “the abject.” For Kristeva, the abject is an entity whose power comes from its ability to make us recoil. She explains how it “persists as exclusion or taboo,” taking the shape of a corpse, waste, or even “the skin on the surface of a glass of milk.” The filmy membrane of Rika’s raincoat serves a similar purpose. It blurs the boundaries between exterior and interior, woman and womb. But it is also the very site of connection between Yagi’s two novels.
At thirty-six weeks pregnant, Shibata goes for an anatomy scan of her fake baby. The doctor offers her an image of the “pale light inside [her] belly.” As her abdomen distends with pain, she wonders if “this is the price to pay. For creating another person, for spinning words.” A man asks Shibata if she’s okay, but she finds herself “covered in a greasy sweat, unable to do anything but nod.” It is here, inside Shibata’s “empty core,” that Rika’s character is already developing. One could argue that the drama of Yagi’s Museum is itself conceived from her Diary of a Void.
It is striking, then, that Museum’s denouement both elicits and expands on a scene after birth. Near the novel’s end, Rika wraps Venus in an “onion bag” and rolls her body onto a “dolly.” At first sight, this detail is easy to miss, as it is overpowered by the other goddesses on display in the gallery, who pose a distraction to Hashibami as Rika and Venus escape. (The statue of Daphne screams, Artemis’s dog bites him. Girl power at its finest.) But it is really remarkable that in the “octangle room” where these figures stand, itself a kind of coffin, Rika places Venus in a mesh meant to contain layer upon layer of golden vegetable, with skins of white and yellow (or purple and red), tasting bitter and sweet: as if to say, this statue, this woman, is all of those things, too.
Still, the very layers of an onion bring to mind a more disturbing “dolly” of the feminine mystique: a nesting doll. As a child playing at my Russian grandmother’s house, I vividly remember opening up each shell and finally getting to the kernel of “the baby” within, and thinking, is that all? The Matryoshka (“little matron”) is supposed to be a national symbol of fertility. Yet her hollow shells are only filled with more of the same wood. She embodies the ultimate paradox of maternity: meant to protect the legacy within her without any aid, meant to make space without any room of her own; meant to move forward without any feet.
How curious and how haunting that, in the icy and inanimate crypt of the museum, “the round bottom[ed]” statue of Venus magnifies the same regression. The goddess of love and fertility literally cannot stand it, so Rika becomes “the mother.” As she pushes Venus out of the gallery, Rika beholds:
The first person I ever held in my own two arms. She was precious. And heavy. . . .
Someone was screaming my name. My spine made a strange creaking noise as I pushed, and as I listened to the succession of sounds, my field of vision was flooded with light.
So, the literal action of Rika’s pushing Venus out of the museum is subsumed by the figurative action of delivering a baby (a screaming of a name, a creaking of the spine, a flood of light). In this symbolic field of vision, “the shell,” which once kept Rika and Venus separated, is broken. But by what means and at what cost?
Museum is less concerned with the possibility of conception than it is with the difficulty of preservation. As a result, it is neither Rika nor Venus but a witness to their appearance outside the gallery who gets the last word. In Museum’s coda, this professor sees Rika (his old student, whom he first recommended for the museum job) on an early flight to Mexico. Though Rika’s own expression is brighter, “her luggage was the first thing to catch my eye. It was a rather dowdy, though colorful, patchwork object that could only be described as a very big bag.”
In this way, Rika accomplishes a less aesthetic version of the covering with which Hora is tasked in the “Birth of Venus.” But, in Yagi’s version, what’s inside “the bag” is no singular beauty. It’s a figure for the very anxiety of influence (when it comes to social media, not Harold Bloom). Readers are made aware of this via Rika’s professor, who describes her staring into a tablet, editing videos of an “Athena” who shares her morning routine. One cannot but think Venus is next in line for such commodified viewing. For Rika can take “the woman” out of the museum, but she can’t take the museum out of the woman. Whether Venus stands on a pedestal or under a patchwork, there is always the potential—and the precarity—of her being put on display.
It is Rika who carries the knowledge of this burden, a cargo much heavier than her raincoat, and which is gendered as much as it is raced. In the present in which Museum is situated, there are myriad more Rikas than there are Venuses. In the aftermath of #MeToo, of plague, and of war, these women hold onto abandoned mattresses, testimonies, and bodies, as they move through a world that has left them behind. We grapple with these loaded images from the comfort of our screens, before getting distracted by some ad for a vibration plate or cake in a cup and scrolling on to the next headline. But taking part in the conversation, as Yagi’s novel lays bare, does not require speaking ancient Latin, really; it’s not a matter of words. Its central message emerges from within the shells of Venus and Rika, gradually transforming the rapturous moments they experience into a reckoning with reality.
For readers who take this message seriously, the takeaway is even deeper. It has to do with a willingness to enter what Yagi terms “a parallel universe,” especially when “the museum is closed.” These are obscure domains, often “frozen in time” as markers of the ruins of civilization. That Venus and Rika plan to visit the pyramids of Teotihuacan at the novel’s end is telling. In her turn, Yagi renders a number of seemingly confined yet unplumbable enclosures—the museum’s “octangle room,” Venus’s marble figure, Rika’s “ridiculous yellow raincoat”—into an opening for women to talk about what they want. That is what makes the Museum an integral work of literature not only for feminist thought, but also for studies of psychology today.
The book’s achievement has to do with its incorporation of Venus and Rika into a liminal space where difference is not sexual but sonic. In fact, the entire book is structured in a round. It begins and ends with the same lines about Venus’s “husky” voice: “Somewhere between a mezzo-soprano and an alto, though leaning more toward alto if I had to choose. If she were singing in a choir.” Rika listens and follows suit: looking upwards, then downwards, and finally, leaning in.
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By chance, I wrote this essay while recovering from a bout of laryngitis. The first sign came on a Saturday morning, when I was woken by a sharp pain in my throat. I rose and, in between fits of coughing, texted friends to cancel plans. “Can’t make it, going on a silent retreat.” But the joke was on me; I had not yet realized that I had no voice.
After the pain subsided, I was left with a peculiar sensation, wanting to speak but unable to emit sound. As the days passed, and the virus left my body, my larynx produced its first whisper. Overeager, I tried for a sentence, which resulted in a screech. The progression was slow, to say the least (no pun intended), but, by the following week, my voice had returned. Audible, but husky.
It occurred to me, then, how much this word—“husky”—matters in Yuki Tejima’s translation of Yagi’s Museum. It is repeated, but with a difference. To Rika, who listens to Venus on her pedestal, her voice is “surprisingly husky.” To the professor, who hears the voice within the “patchwork,” it is “rather husky.” For Rika, the voice evokes a feeling. For the professor, it involves a formality. And for Venus, it expresses the very feeling of having one’s soul removed for the sake of being rendered a spectacle. As viewers inspect and comment on her figure, Venus stands silent, with nowhere to retreat and nothing to say. Her voice is husky from over two millennia of underuse. She has been waiting to speak. She has been waiting for Rika.
In one of the most poignant passages in the novel, Rika visits the museum on a day that it is open to the public. As she makes her way upstairs to see Venus, she walks through an exhibition of clock hands:
As I regarded then, I imagined using clock hands in surgery. I pictured a baby’s finger being reattached with invisible thread, human nerves resembling a spider’s web being sewn together, a delicate tear in the blood vessel of a beating heart or muted brain being repaired, the gentle stitching-up of half-open eyelids on an elderly person in their final days. I imagined our bodies being sewn together by time.
Caught in this intricate web of life and death, Rika makes her way to a bathroom. Its door is so light that the momentum sends her flying: “I fell onto the sink. I stared into the basin, my eyes flashing, and thought about the veins in Venus’s ear.”
What, indeed, could be more delicate than these vessels?
Long ago, a Roman sculptor pondered what it would mean if the slab of marble in his studio had a vascular system. He could not have foreseen that, in the twenty-first century, this vision would be brought to life by a Japanese writer who would turn back the hands of time and connect the sculpture and a woman through their veins.
But the story, as Emi Yagi herself tells us, “originated from a different place. I was riding an escalator in a department store and saw an undressed mannequin, and I thought, I wonder what that mannequin would say to me right now.”
For Yagi knows well that, even when the mouth is closed, or the voice is wrapped in a husk, the door to the ear remains open. It requires neither key nor secret password for those who, like her Rika, engage the imagination.
It was, of course, the goddess Venus who imparted this wisdom to each of us as children, walking along the shore, collecting shells. As we put these mollusks to our ears, we stared into the basin of the ocean, puzzled, eyes flashing before the sun, and wondered why it sounded like the beach. From behind, we heard adults nagging that we were too close to the waves. They approached us with towels.
We said we didn’t need them and ran off to build a castle.
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When the Museum Is Closed. By Emi Yagi. Translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tejima. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2026.