In Japan, two young women have developed a set of note paper and fountain pens that can be eaten.
It is aimed at female customers: if their stomachs are growling in a meeting, they are supposed to secretly nibble on their writing utensils to satisfy their hunger.
But the women can no longer write anything down.
In contemporary literature it's usually the other way around - female characters don't eat anything, they can write for that. There have been a number of very successful novels that follow this pattern in recent years. There is always a protagonist who is an author or wants to be one, and it is repeatedly mentioned that she hardly eats. And if she does, it happens the same as in the Japanese meeting: she stops writing.
These texts are neither about conscious fasting in favor of art, nor are they biographies of anorexia.
The main focus of these novels is a female protagonist who writes or wants to write in some form, how she lives, and often how she desires a man.
Their eating habits remain in the background as a motive;
nor is it a totally conspicuous starvation, more of a passive non-eating punctuated by moments of eating and not writing.
Nothing about it is as explicit and spectacular as that of the male authors of the past, who associated their writing with "emaciation in all directions".
And it's not men who create these characters, who usually write conspicuously and usually don't eat, but female authors.
"My stomach is rumbling"
For example, the celebrated Irish writer Sally Rooney: all her novels are about love, getting closer, misunderstandings - and the focus is on young, smart, writing women who hardly eat. “By the time I finished, I had written over three thousand words. It was after three and I hadn't eaten all day. I took my hands off the keyboard and in the light (...) they seemed emaciated," says Rooney's debut "Conversations with Friends", for example, at the point when the main character Frances writes her big prose play. In general, it often happens that the "extremely thin" Frances spends days poring over her texts in the library: "Most of the time I forgot to eat on days like this and went out into the evening with a nice, piercing headache." Only in the phases whenin which Frances has an affair with the married Nick, she eats whatever he prepares for her - and no longer writes.
Similarly, Marianne, the gifted Normal People student, rarely eats when she's writing her college papers, and only manages to get a little appetite when she's with her male counterpart, Connell.
In the recently published "Beautiful world, where are you", Rooney then divides this pattern into two characters: on the one hand, Eileen, who is always described as "thin and pale", editor in a literary magazine, who, in contrast to the other characters, hardly ever eats but longs to write a book;
on the other hand, her best friend Alice, who has actually written several books but now no longer wants to write, but instead cooks and eats and, for a Rooney character, is unusually open about being in love.