Abstract

No matter what dark clouds cover the times, your star will continue to shine....
Seven stories of women from their 20s to 50s, looking at the hopes and prayers of each generation, are depicted in the quiet writing style of this remarkable author.

■Tsubakihime
A new designer in her early 20s who is carrying her adulterous partner's child meets a pregnant teenager at a maternity hospital she visits with the intention of having an abortion. ......

■Until Dawn
Hikaru, whose mother was a famous actress, denied her mother's way of life, but after her mother's death, she follows her mother's will and visits “Yomei” station in Kyushu, Japan.

■Prayer for one star
A 35-year-old successful copywriter is told a sad story about the upper class during the war by an old massage therapist he calls at a hotel. The blind woman tells him about her own tragic love as a daughter, the maid who served her devotedly, and the war that ravaged the Japanese people as well. ......

■Side trip
Two single, single, always-traveling girlfriends visit the Shirakami Mountains, but they become curious about a flamboyant young woman on the tour bus. ......

■ Chorus.
A woman in her 40s who is an unmarried mother. She and her junior high school daughter, who doesn't open up to her, decide to visit the crested ibis on Sado Island for free study. ......

■Nagara River
A year after her husband's death from cancer in her fifties, Gyoko and her daughter and her fiancé go cormorant fishing on the Nagara River. This is also the place where she and her husband once traveled together.

■Sinking Bridge
Fifty-nine-year-old Tae, who works at a diner in Kochi, comes across the news of the prosecution of singer Yua Ato. Tae was once Yua's stepmother.

Author’s Information

Born in Tokyo in 1962. Graduated from Kwansei Gakuin University with a BA in Japanese Literature and Waseda University with a BA in Art History. After working for Itochu Corporation, Mori Art Museum Preparatory Office, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, she became a freelance curator and culture writer in 2002. In 2012, she won the 25th Shugoro Yamamoto Award for “Rakuen no Canvas” and in 2017, she won the 36th Nitta Jiro Literary Award for “Leech Sensei”. Her many other works include “Today, the Sun is Well,” “Kinema no Kamisama,” “Hoshi ga Hitotsubetto Kibouri,” “Tayutaeta mo Sinkamu,” “Revolver,” and many others.