Troubled Waters

About

Five stories from Japan's first professional woman writer, chronicling the lives of working-class women in turn-of-the-century Tokyo with a precision and compassion that her male contemporaries rarely achieved. Higuchi wrote about poverty, arranged marriages, and the limited options available to women with the authority of someone who knew these constraints firsthand — she died at twenty-four, leaving behind a body of work that changed Japanese literature. This new translation restores the vitality of Higuchi's prose, capturing both the formal beauty of her literary Japanese and the emotional rawness beneath it. Several stories appear in English for the first time. The essential work of a writer who had twenty-four years and used every one of them — fiction that speaks for the women her era preferred to silence.