Inside all of us, there is someone just waiting to feel understood.
Emi Yagi’s second novel, When the Museum is Closed acts as a great comfort to those who often find themselves feeling out of place. Utilizing magical realism, Yagi creates a world that forces the reader to accept rather than question the lives of its characters, blending fantasy and reality into a murky and fantastical in-between.
Main character Rika Horauchi is practically invisible. She spends her days hiding behind her yellow raincoat and watching the world go by around her. She finds no comfort in her native tongue, and instead feels most understood and expressive in the dead language of Latin: a language in which nobody can judge her for the way she speaks because no one alive is able to truly correct her.
After taking a job at a local museum speaking to a statue of Venus after hours, Horauchi and the reader are both shown an expansive world of famous artworks, dead languages, and marble busts that come to life when no one is looking. Venus, who dubs Horauchi with the loving nickname “Hora” exists beyond the confines of human mortality or movement. She is confined to a life of being oggled by men with no way of speaking up or protesting. Even if she were to speak, it would not be in a language that the museum’s patrons would understand.
In some ways that makes this plot simple. Shy young woman who does not speak falls for a talkative marble statue who wants nothing more than to be able to talk to others endlessly. But there are many more layers to what Yagi is doing than that.
Latin evolves in Yagi’s work to create a stand-in for the ways in which queer women often feel ostracized and alienated. Hora and Venus are the only two who can understand each other, and they are united by this dead language that is not considered to have societal value. Their goals are different: Venus wants nothing more than to escape the museum by any means necessary, even death. Hora wants to continue to bond with the only person who she feels safe with, no matter what it takes. They cannot save each other, but they will try.
Throughout their time together, Hora’s language skills improve, and her confidence grows with them. But beyond that, the intimate relationship between woman and statue grows much more potent and powerful. The two of them are desperate for a life with one another where they can be lovers, but they are confined by the rules of the museum as well as the world outside of it.
This creates a deep and longing ache that permeates the piece. I watched as Hora came out of her shell with Venus, but still rejected human connection with others. She worked horrible hours at a freezer when she wasn’t at the museum. She ignored dinner offers from her neighbors and struggled to communicate with a young boy that needed her help, even if she needed him just as much. As a reader, I wanted Hora to understand that there is more to the world than the museum. Hora, as the main character, works to teach Venus that same lesson. I found myself rooting for the cycle to end with the escape of both characters, but the overhanging impossibility of the task left me wondering where Yagi would take them. In this way, it is deeply reminiscent of the true queer experience: finding one another amidst impossibility.
My greatest wish with this piece that I felt was unexplored was with the relationships Hora had outside of Venus. Her neighbors in the apartment complex orbit her life just as she orbits theirs, but the effort that this small group makes to truly connect with one another comes far later in the piece than I was hoping. Yagi provides a small breadcrumb trail of details about the lives of those around Hora, but the reader must dig for them, leading the payoff towards the end of the piece involving Hora and Thoma to feel slightly less satisfactory. There is a chance that this distance is purposeful beyond the simple shy characterization of Hora and is instead meant to emphasize how obsessive she has become, focusing her energy only on Venus. However, I find subscribing to that interpretation would instead color the romantic relationship of the piece with too much toxicity.
There was so much to love about this piece. The sheer oddity of it keeps you turning page after page. The layers of comedy interwoven with the longing offset the heavier subject matter with a tone that at times feels more like a rom-com. It becomes an intricate, feel-good story of joy, resistance, and finding someone who understands you. Even if she is carved from stone and thousands of years old.
