検索キーワード： "Mieko Kawakami" 世界文学

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.

Kimiko Yoshikawa, a sixty-year-old woman, is on trial for holding a girl in captivity for many years. When Hana stumbles across a newspaper account of this shocking crime, her steady life begins to unravel. As she dredges up memories of her fraught adolescence, the novel takes us back to the late 1990s — a time of economic upheaval that cast the have-nots, like Hana and Kimiko, into society's dark underbelly. Struggling to survive in a merciless society that preys on the weak, Hana is forced to make choices that will scar her for life.