The Dilemmas of Working Women

The classic Japanese bestseller published in English for the very first time - a darkly funny and relatable book portraying the lives of five women

Izumi needs to get a job.

Haruka needs to stop talking about how she once had cancer.

Kato 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.

The Dilemmas of Working Women is a delight. With acute insight and sly humour, Fumio Yamamoto depicts the lives of modern Japanese women in all their complexity. The characters, in their quirky idiosyncrasies, are deeply familiar; their stoicisms heartbreaking -- Yoon Choi, author of Skinship
What an engaging, witty, and unique book. So brilliantly written that I kept trying to memorise sentences in order to repeat them to people later. What a win for the English language that we're finally getting to experience Yamamoto's inimitable voice -- Roxy Dunn, author of As Young as This
An offbeat, bold and subversive portrait of contemporary womanhood, full of brilliantly unconventional characters. The Dilemmas of Working Women crackles and pops with humour, empathy and intelligence -- Lisa Owens, author of Not Working

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 Chuo Koron 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 Montreal. His most recent translations include Sunrise: Radiant Stories by award-winning author Erika Kobayashi and Slow Down by Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito.

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