The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima
This is a collection of eight short stories. The heroines are women dealing with raising kids on their own and being single and lonely and jealous and angry.
It’s not so much that they women don’t know who they are but that their future is uncertain. The Japanese expectations of duty to others and not living for one’s self are still there, but are in conflict with new social realities like sexual freedom, single motherhood, the ability to abandon partners spouses and kids, and a sense of responsibility to one's own self.
I also got a gritty sense of life in Tokyo because she mentioins construction noise and dust in almost every story. The stories were written about 30 years ago, but I think they can provide enjoyment to people into modern Japanese literature, women’s fiction, or artifacts that give us a sense of what social life in Japan feels like.
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