Author: Mitsuyo Kakuta File Type: epub This compelling novel, widely acclaimed for its perceptive portrayal of the everyday lives and struggles of Japanese women, struck a deep chord with readers throughout Japan. In 2005 it won the prestigious Naoki Prize, awarded semiannually for the best work of popular fiction by an established writer.Sayoko, a thirty-five-year-old homemaker with a three-year-old child, begins working for Aoi, a free-spirited, single career woman her own age who runs a travel agency-housekeeping business. Timid and unable to connect with other mothers in her neighborhood, Sayoko finds herself drawn to Aois independent lifestyle and easygoing personality. The two hit it off from the start, beginning a friendship that is for Sayoko also a reaffirmation of what living is about.Aoi, meanwhile, has not always been the self-confident person she appears to be. Severe classroom bullying in junior high had forced her to change schools, uprooting her and her family to the countryside and at her new school, she was so afraid of again becoming the object of her classmates cruelties that she spent most of her time steering clear of those around her.The present-day friendship between Sayoko and Aoi on the one hand, and Aois painful high school past on the other, form a gripping two-tier narrative that converges in the final chapter. The book touches on a broad range of issues of concern to women today, from marriage and childrearing to being single and working for oneself. It is a universal story about both the fear and the joy of opening up to others.From Publishers WeeklyAll that happy talk about understanding one another and people everywhere being basically the same, its all a bunch of crap. Everybodys different, rants Aoi, one of the protagonists of Kakutas authoritative U.S. debut. The story moves between the contemporary story of 30-something housewife Sayoko Tamura, who is tentatively stepping back into the work force, and that of Aoi Narahashi, a shy girl whose parents move to a small town so that she can escape the bullying at her Yokohama high school, set 20 years earlier. The teenaged outcast Aoi makes a crucial, tragic friendship that turns her into an unconventional adult, and in the contemporary narrative, the adult Aoi hires Sayoko to head the new house-cleaning venture of her travel company, Platinum Planet. Success, the two women discover, lies not in corporate ladders, family, conforming to other peoples expectations or cutting all ties to follow your bliss. Instead, it lies in the very process of work, and in the connections that arise in that process-with difference being the one thing everyone has in common. The translation occasionally feels more colloquial than necessary, but it nicely conveys the novels mood of quiet epiphany. Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. ReviewThis is a poignant and beautifully written novel, a novel that is timeless in many ways, a classic in our modern world. -Blogcritics Magazine (Online)