The novel follows Natsuko, a single woman in Tokyo, weighing her options. She is briefly captivated by a Danish sperm bank, which seems to offer an easy, modern route to single motherhood. That hope is soon undercut when she hallucinates her abusive father, a reminder of the patriarchal world she cannot simply leave behind.

For Wan, these two scenes are two sides of the same problem. The sperm bank offers the individual choice associated with ‘the West’. The hallucinated father embodies patriarchal control rooted in Japanese tradition which functions in the novel as a spectre. Neither is really free: one is a marketing fantasy she can’t access, the other inherited trauma she still experiences in hallucination.

Her search for a father, Wan argues, is really a search for a way out of both. That apparent way out is Aizawa, a friend whom Natsuko chooses as the father of her child. Unlike the Danish donor or her own father, Aizawa fits neatly into neither category – his own complicated family history means he doesn’t sit comfortably within either traditional Japanese bloodlines or the fantasy of the West.

However, Wan argues that the novel’s real alternative isn’t Aizawa himself but the imagined child they create together, pictured not as belonging to any nation but as something cosmic, thus potentially outside modernity: ‘a nebula… millions of years away’. Wan reads this as Natsuko inventing a third option: an identity built on promise, love and choice, rather than nationality or bloodline.

But Wan is careful not to overstate the victory. After the birth, Natsuko’s imagery returns to Earth, suggesting that even the boldest fantasy of escape is drawn back into reality. The novel doesn’t resolve modernity’s contradictions – it shows how necessary imagining a way out can be.