4 ideas
In 1990 a young Belgian woman fluent in Japanese joins the Tokyo trading firm Yumimoto on a one-year contract as an interpreter. She ends up cleaning the men's toilets. She stays until the contract ends so that she does not break the Japanese custom of not quitting early.
In a rigid hierarchy, a subordinate is punished for showing ability outside her assigned role, because it threatens the standing of the people directly above her. The narrator writes a strong report on low-fat butter for a colleague, and her own direct superior reports her for it. She serves tea to Japanese visitors in polished, formal Japanese and is reprimanded, because her fluency made the visitors uneasy. She is ordered to stop understanding Japanese. The punishment is for crossing her assigned role and has nothing to do with how good the work was.
The narrator treats taking every humiliation without quitting as a way of keeping her dignity. By staying the full year and following the firm's own code of never resigning early, she turns her submission into a kind of resistance. The system cannot make her lose face if she outlasts what it does to her.
Fubuki is cruel to the narrator partly because she is herself trapped. She is an unmarried Japanese woman approaching 30 who has reached her position only through perfect obedience, so she passes the pressure she lives under down to the only person ranked below her. The narrator's monologue on the rules governing Japanese women presents this cruelty as a product of the system, as much as a trait of Fubuki's character.