Izumi lost her husband and her job. Now she spends her time doing craft projects like sewing handmade stuffed animals. She has come to realize that she spent 20 years acting the role of “successful woman”.
Since my teens, I’d always been striving to get ahead, to climb higher and higher, and this desire was real. I’d wanted to win. Just win, no matter what. But win at what?
These days, she doesn’t know how to play ‘Unemployed, Age 34’.
Haruka is in remission from breast cancer. She’s grateful to the boyfriend who supported her through her treatment, and, for now, gratitude is enough to keep their relationship together. Still, it grates that Hyosuke would much prefer that Haruka keep her cancer a secret. Over and over again, he tries to explain that references to her illness make people uncomfortable. “It [isn’t] easy, being loved,” she thinks.
Japan and its writers have been coping with the reality of economic decline for decades.
The Dilemmas of Working Women is a collection of five short stories by the late Fumio Yamamoto (1962-2021). Originally published in Japanese in 2000, the stories are a product of the continuing fallout from the popping of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s and the ensuing Employment Ice Age. The protagonist of the story ‘Here, Which Is Nowhere’, for example, works three nights a week at a supermarket now that her husband has been ‘restructured’, a euphemism for being demoted to protect a company’s bottom line.
Japan and its writers have been coping with the reality of economic decline—and the end of its position as “Number One”—for decades. It’s part of what makes some of the fiction translated into English during the recent Japanese literature boom seem so of-the-moment, even fiction written in the 90s and 00s. The translation of Yamamoto’s short story collection comes 25 years after its original publication, but the English-language translation is startlingly relevant.
The Dilemmas of Working Women is also about the post-World-War-II undertow of gendered expectations that pull at the lives of Japanese people. One successful woman switches from full- to part-time work after her children are born as a matter of course. Another considers accepting a marriage proposal from her problematic boyfriend; at least it will get her out of the house of her controlling and physically abusive father. A third has to go back to work, but finds herself carrying the workload of a full-time, stay-at-home housewife nevertheless. Several women struggle with bosses who anticipate their resignations the moment they marry or coworkers who think married career women are “unpleasant”. Like tales of post-bubble economic woes, these stories of sexism in 1990s Japan also resonate in the English-speaking world in 2025.
Men’s attraction to and fear of strong women is a pervasive motif in the collection, too. For example, Izumi has a brief relationship with an unimpressive, younger former co-worker. A self-described “loser, a whipped dog with his tail between his legs”, he once had a crush on Izumi because she was “a winner”, unlike him. But as someone who was both “a winner” and female, she also, in his words, spoke in a “nasty and abrasive” way. Her marriage, too, had been doomed by her professional drive. According to Izumi, it “all came down to [her] insistence on dominating every little thing having to do with the business” she and her husband ran together. Nevermind that the shared business was significantly more successful with Izumi on board.
Still, author Fumio Yamamoto recognizes that men, too, are being dragged under by the same expectations that weigh down the women in her stories. As the protagonist of the title story opines:
Looking at the salarymen dozing in the train car around me, I thought about how powerful men were and how pitiful. Just by being born men, they [are] expected to take the lead both at work and at home. They [can] never say they’d be fine getting the smaller piece of the cake.
“A Tomorrow Full of Love” stands out among the others in the collection, partially because it is the only story to feature a male protagonist as the first-person narrator. Majima once worked as a salaryman; today, he owns a hole-in-the-wall izakaya. He is a man of decidedly old-fashioned character who wants to “run a place where a customer coming in all alone would feel welcome.”
My place was somewhere you could go to be among people you had no connections or obligations to, where you could have a nice conversation or keep to yourself, a place to have a drink and disappear for a while. My ideal watering hole.
It turns out that Majima has built a community space whether he meant to or not—and being a member of the community he created is no easy challenge for him. His only employee kindly but forcefully informs him that he isn’t interested in women, not because he is “a homo” (Majima’s words), but “gay”. The only female regular adds another complication when she becomes something like Majima’s live-in girlfriend.
As the story progresses and Yamamoto adds both additional characters and additional complications, she subtly illustrates just how much the expectations of how a Japanese man “should” act have harmed Majima and the people around him—and what he stands to gain if he can bring himself to let them go.
Bergstrom’s translation is a treat in and of itself.
Bergstrom’s translation of Yamamoto’s writing is a treat in and of itself. It’s full of clever turns of phrase, such as when Izumi considers whether to wake her “whipped dog with his tail between his legs” or to “let [her] sleeping dog lie.” Even more impressive, each of the five first-person narrators also come across with their own, unique voices—an achievement likely attributable to both Yamamoto’s Japanese original and Bergstrom’s English translation. (Haruka in “Planarian” sounds like the protagonist of a Sayaka Murata story, blithely unaware about the social norms that govern the behaviour of everyone around her.)
The Dilemmas of Working Women also closes with a perceptive translator’s note from Bergstrom, notable for providing exactly enough context to add depth to the book’s flavour without digesting the book on the reader’s behalf. It includes additional biography—of both Yamamoto and the book—as well as Bergstrom’s restrained observations about the stories’ contents. It is, indeed, Yamamoto’s “difficult” heroines and her ambiguous endings, and her interest in the emotional contours of women’s everyday lives’ that is on full display in the collection and makes it a both powerful and delightful read.
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