Izumi needs to get a job.
Haruka needs to stop talking about how she once had cancer.
Kat- needs to get through a shift at the convenience store without being harassed.
Mito needs to break up with her boyfriend - or marry him.
Sumie just needs somewhere to live.
In this classic Japanese bestseller, published in English twenty-five years after it took Japan by storm, the lives of five ordinary women are depicted with irresistible humour and searing emotional insight.
[quotes tk]

Portrait

Fumio Yamamoto burst onto the Japanese literary scene in 1999 when she won the Yoshikawa Eiji New Writer's Prize for her book Loveaholic. Her follow-up in 2000, The Dilemmas of Working Women, won the prestigious Naoki Prize in Literature, before becoming a bestselling phenomenon. Her final novel, Rotations and Revolutions, was awarded both the Shimasei Literature Prize and the Ch-- K-ron Prize in 2021, and her journals, offering an intimate portrait of dealing with depression and then with pancreatic cancer, also became hugely popular. Yamamoto passed away in 2021 in Karuizawa, Nagano.
Brian Bergstrom is a lecturer and translator who has lived in Chicago, Kyoto, and Yokohama, and is currently based in Montréal. His most recent translations include Sunrise: Radiant Stories by award-winning author Erika Kobayashi and Slow Down by Marxist philosopher K-hei Sait-.