Fukumori continuedfrom previous page unnecessary change to their family's annual summer ritual: "Would things have worked out better ifwe'd gone to West Izu, not Fiji?" Yuzuki Muroi's "Piss," on the other hand, presents a drastically different portrait of young sexuality through the eyes of a prostitute, Miyuki, who has come to Tokyo from the provinces, only to find herself world-weary at the threshold of her twenties, betrayed by her boyfriend and best friend, and abused by her manager and clients. Poignantly, she finds affirmation in a regular client, who serves as her "witness": "He's seen me standing there, right in front of him. He's seen my blood, my tears, my piss. My purity." Graphic depictions of sex strip the protagonist to her most basic instincts and desires, and despite its escalating despair, the story captures, in the end, a believable glimmer of hope. Women in their late twenties and thirties are the heroines in the next four stories. Working women, specifically, are the protagonists of Shungiku Uchida 's "My Son's Lips," Amy Yamada's "Fiesta," and Junko Hasegawa's "Unfertilized Egg." "My Son's Lips" is a first-person narrative of a working mother of two whose busy life is knocked off its precarious equilibrium when she is assumed by a taxi driver to be "nothing more than a stay-at-home housewife, totally wrapped up in my kids," despite her silent insistence that "I'm not the woman the driver thinks I am." This misidentity bleeds into the woman's assessment of her problematic relationships with the young male subordinates in her office, who are seemingly attracted to her maternal qualities, and leads to the story's unexpected and slightly unnerving ending. Known for her frank sexual portrayals, Amy Yamada exhibits a playful narrative twist in "Fiesta" through staging an allegory ofelements ofa repressed woman's psyche, with Desire the featured protagonist who rallies the rest ofthe cast (Obsession, Reason, Pride, etc.) to liberate their mistress from her unrequited love for a work colleague. The last of the working women trilogy, "Unfertilized Egg," portrays an unmarried thirty-six-year-old woman, Moriko, who is involved in a dead-end relationship with her boss. She feels the urgency of what may be her final chance at carrying on her family's maternal tradition of giving birth to B-blood-type girls in the zodiac Year of the Horse, and this biological crisis haunts her through dreams of eggs and through an endless bowl of coconut milk and tapioca, which Moriko methodically eats throughout the story. Chiya Fujino's "Her Room" departs from the space of work and explores the travails of a recently divorced woman in her late twenties whose niceness is tested when a social misfit persistently seeks out her friendship. Both the heroine, Kyoko, and the unmarried Kitahara-san are anomalies in a society that largely expects women ofa certain age to be married and settled with children, and Kyoko's reactions to Kitahara-san serve both to highlight Kyoko's own quick-to-please vulnerabilities, as well as the stereotypes of spinsters made monstrous in the "syrupy" voiced Kitahara-san. The ending is ingenious, with Kyoko's imagination turning to horror movie spookiness in spite of reality's surprising blandness. The collection closes with Nobuko Takagi's "The Shadow of the Orchid." The protagonist is Michiko, a forty-nine-year-old wife of a physician, whose son has just gone away to college. Finding herself listless, perhaps suffering from a bourgeois case of "a disease of affluence or a disease of happiness " after her son has left the nest, Michiko begins to resent a dendrobium orchid given to her husband by a young female patient who had recently died of cancer. In her melancholy, Michiko enters into a fantasy world in which she converses with the female patient made manifest in the orchid. As an ending note to this anthology, "The Shadow of the Orchid" resonates eloquently the unstemmed desires of women, which extend beyond the conventional life-cycle narrative that casts women as maiden, wife, and mother. Naomi Fukumori is assistant professor ofJapanese literature at Ohio State University. She...