検索キーワード： "Mieko Kawakami" 文芸小説

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.

In Heaven, a 14-year-old boy is tormented for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, he chooses to suffer in silence. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate, Kojima, who experiences similar treatment at the hands of her bullies. Providing each other with immeasurable consolation at a time in their lives when they need it most, the two young friends grow closer than ever. But what, ultimately, is the nature of a friendship when your shared bond is terror?

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.

Rising star Mieko Kawakami reaches new heights in this pacy, thrilling novel, a Japanese Breaking Bad, in which a group of friends fight for freedom, independence, and survival in Tokyo of the 1990s, a world rapidly dividing into haves and have-nots.