Rika Hourachi has an unusual talent. She’s fluent in conversational Latin. It makes her the perfect hire for an odd position at a nearby museum. The staff needs someone to keep one of their marble statues company. The first century Roman copy of a Greek statue of Aphrodite is lonely. After all, all the other art in the room speaks Greek. A deeply lonely human being, Rika quickly falls in love with the marble goddess.
While Emi Yagi’s only other novel translated into English, Diary of a Void, flirts with magical realism, When the Museum Is Closed fully commits to a reality that is only transitory. Statues speak, but it is unclear how many people can hear them. Rika is trapped in a vinyl yellow raincoat that only she can see and feel. Rika and a marble statue have on-page sex, in open defiance of the museum rule, “Please do not touch the art.”
The novel’s antagonist is the museum’s “astonishingly good-looking” curator, Hashibami. It doesn’t take long for Rika to realize his place in Venus’s “life” is vaguely sinister, especially after he explains to Rika that he prefers statues to people—statues never leave his side and they don’t move or speak up in public. He spends hours doing preservation work on Venus, peering at her with a loupe “as though he believe[s] that if he stare[s] long enough, the object before him [will] become his.”
When the Museum Is Closed is an extended meditation on—almost an allegory for—what it truly means to be objectified, as told by a woman in love with a character who is, truly, a female object. Venus has no control over how she is treated in the museum. Even her name is under dispute—the curator has labeled her by her Greek title, “Aphrodite”, even though she much more closely identifies with her Roman persona. “People want to look at you because you’re beautiful. I don’t see anything wrong with that,” Rika offers. Venus offers back
Even when I don’t recall ever signing up for a modelling agency? Try being ogled all day long. You start to feel empty inside. Like there’s not an original thought in your head.
As Rika notes, Venus’s face has been “meticulously spared of all characteristics that make a face unique”; Venus is both herself and every woman ever put on display against her will.
It’s possible, too, to read When the Museum Is Closed as Rika’s coming-out narrative as a woman who is attracted to women. She has held herself apart from everyone else in her life since the elementary school math lesson when she’d learned about parallel lines that “stretch on forever and never meet”. She refused to take home the email address of the study abroad roommate with whom she learned conversational Latin. But, with Venus, she realizes she might not need the freedoms from desiring someone and from being herself that she has so carefully guarded. With the avatar of all women, she allows herself to fall in love and have sex for the first time in her life.
Emi Yagi’s novel is also notable for its gorgeous prose.
Emi Yagi’s novel is also notable for its gorgeous prose, rendered into luscious English by translator Yuki Tejima. For example, Rika describes the sounds of the other statues’ speech as
the sounds of ancient Greek—or perhaps it was another language—weaving lace designs in the air to pass the time.
Venus sits “beyond the shadows created by the overlapping banter”. Each sentence is evocative, dripping with figurative language and classical allusion.
The very first time Venus meets Rika, she asks if she can make a nickname—Hora—from her family name, Hourachi. This nickname, too, is a classical allusion and a statement of hope for what Rika and Venus can come to mean to each other. The Hora of Spring from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus places a robe over the nude Venus. In this queer, magical realist love story, only Rika can rescue Venus from the male gaze.