The Waiting Years
Translated by John Bester
About
Tomo's husband demands she find him a mistress. She does. Then another. And another. Over decades, Tomo procures the women who humiliate her, maintains the household that degrades her, and endures a marriage built on her own subjugation — all while the relationships between herself and the mistresses she has provided develop their own complicated, painful intimacy. Fumiko Enchi's novel is one of the most devastating portraits of marital cruelty in Japanese literature — told not from the perspective of the tyrant but from the woman who holds his world together while it crushes her. A novel about the particular horror of being complicit in your own destruction — and about the rage that builds when compliance is the only option.
