"Here are Japanese women in infinite and fascinating variety -- ardent lovers, lonely single women, political activists, betrayed wives, loyal wives, protective mothers, embittered mothers, devoted daughters. ... a new sense of the richness of Japanese women's experience, a new appreciation for feelings too long submerged". -- The New York Times Book Review

Introduction, The Family of Koiwai, The Full Moon, Blind Chinese Soldiers, Narcissus, Residues of Squalor, Memory of a Night, Love in Two Lives: The Remnant, Ants Swann, To Stab, Facing the Hills They Stand, Congruent Figures, The Smile of a Mountain Witch, Yellow Sand, In the Pot.

Noriko Mizuta Lippit received her Ph.D. from Yale University. She has taught English, American, Japanese, and Comparative literature at Dokkyo University, Josai University, and Tokyo Women's University in Japan, and at Marymount College, Scripps College, and the University of Southern California in the United States. She is currently Director of the Center for Inter-Cultural Studies and Education at Josai University. Kyoko Iriye Selden is a graduate of Tokyo University and of Yale University, where she received a Ph.D. in English. She is the co-editor and translator of The Atomic Bomb, Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (M.E. Sharpe, 1989), and translator, with Noriko Mizuta Lippit, of The Short Stories of Tomioka Taeko (forthcoming). She has taught English, Japanese, and comparative literature at Tsuda College (Tokyo) and Washington University (St. Louis). Currently she teaches Japanese language literature at Cornell University.