Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free E-arc in exchange for a review!

I’d say I’ve read quite a lot of historical fiction in my time, but I definitely haven’t read anything about Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule, and the subsequent Japanese invasion during the war, so I was excited to be approved for Birth Canal by Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri - translated by the author herself! You know when a book is dealing with colonialism and war that you’ll need to brace yourself, and although this book is only slim (160 pages), Wuri packs a lot of emotional impact into four vignettes each focusing on four different women.

None of the four women have much in common beyond their gender and the fact that they all find their lives being defined by the violence inflicted on them by men. A young woman in modern day Jakarta tries to deal with an unwanted pregnancy on her own, a woman during the war finds herself forced into prostitution for the Japanese military, a woman deals with a traumatised husband and an American photographer who is dangerously obsessed with her, and finally another young woman struggling to conceive while her husband is the opposite of supportive.

I liked the way that the two more modern narratives sandwiched the two 20th-century narratives at the beginning and end, although it was depressing in how obvious it made it that women are constantly suffering, have suffered and will suffer. The circumstances change, wars end, power changes hands, but women continue to bear the brunt of the brutality of both war and men. Sometimes the perspective would shift to the second person within each vignette, and I did find this a bit confusing. With four stories already vying for space in such a slim novel, I felt that these shifts took me out of the narrative too much and then I had to situate myself again.

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Bleak & brutal, as is to be expected.