The Dilemmas of Working Women: Stories

A spiky, edgy collection of five sly yet sensitive stories spotlighting clear-eyed and “difficult” women who are navigating their identities as workers and women in contemporary Japan—a feminist, anti-capitalist modern classic published outside Asia and in English for the first time.

The Dilemmas of Working Women is Fumio Yamamoto’s darkly witty look at modern Japanese women who are ambivalent about their lives and jobs. In “Naked,” a woman who’s simultaneously lost her business and her husband finds that it is surprisingly comfortable to stay at home sewing stuffed animals, even if it makes her a “loser” in the eyes of society. In “Planarian,” a young woman recovering from breast cancer tells her friends and boyfriend that she would prefer to be the titular worm to organically regenerate her body. Each of these spiky women—as well as the three other protagonists in this groundbreaking work—chafes against social expectations that equate work with worth and demand women squeeze into the confining and sometimes dehumanizing role of employee in a world built by and for men.

First published in Japan in 2000, The Dilemmas of Working Women struck a nerve with Japanese readers and became a bestselling literary sensation, selling nearly half a million copies and winning the prestigious Naoki Prize in Literature. A quarter of a century later, this brilliant modern classic—available for the first time outside Asia and in English—remains deliciously funny and astonishingly relevant.

Fumio Yamamoto was a Japanese author. Leaving her job at a brokerage firm for a literary career, Fumio Yamamoto’s writing displays a signature blend of humor and piercing social commentary on the place of women in Japanese society. Her book ‘Loveaholic’ (Kadokawa, 1998), a workplace novel about a woman who’s obsessed with her colleague and starts stalking him, put her on the literary map by winning the 1999 Yoshikawa Eiji New Writer’s Prize. After a prolific career as both a novelist and beloved essayist, her final novel, ‘Rotations and Revolutions’ (Shinchōsha, 2020), was awarded both the Shimasei Literature Prize and the Chūo Kōron Prize in 2021. Her journals, offering an intimate portrait of the author dealing with pancreatic cancer, also became hugely popular. In 2021, Yamamoto passed away at the untimely age of 58.

Brian Bergstrom is a Montréal-based lecturer and translator. His translations have appeared in publications including Granta, Aperture, LitHub, Mechademia, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, and Elemental: Earth Stories. His translation of Trinity, Trinity, Trinity by Erika Kobayashi (Astra House, 2022) won the 2022 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. His most recent translation is Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (Astra House, 2024) by Marxist philosopher Kōhei Saitō.