The woman with the purple skirt is a local celebrity, at least according to her ghostly admirer/stalker telling us all about her days, and his/her efforts to improve her situation. 

The viewpoint is strange and is the main attraction of this book: the narrator is close and away, there and not there.

We were in the recycling-collection area. The sanitation workers had not yet come to pick up the trash. Other than the director and the Woman in the Purple Skirt, no one else was there. 

The narrator seems to be one of these invisible people created by contemporary life, and Japan seems to have a lot of them - never noticed, except when failure is involved; eventually, spectacular failure becomes the only way to exist in someone's eyes (see: angry teenagers with guns). As much as the narrator is diminished in his/her own circle, the Woman in the Purple Skirt and her everyday life are aggrandized in his/her eyes.

The book itself feels like an elongated short story, with its punchline.

Coincidence or bias of the 2019 Akutagawa panel - this is the same story as the following year's winner, Rin Usami's Idol, Burning: a citizen barely able to comply and engage with the world is born out of the belly of obsession, and stands as a somewhat fuller human.