Yoko (winner of the Akutagawa Prize in 1971) is the story of a sensitive young man’s relationship with the title character, a beautiful young woman who is suffering from an apparently hereditary mental illness. Through Yoko’s vivid but distorted perceptions of the world, Furui highlights the process by which reality and identity are created. Above all, however, Yoko is a touching, if somewhat unusual, tale of a young couple’s deepening love.

The other two short stories in this collection,
The Plain of Sorrows
and
The Doll,
deal with the subject of coming to terms with aging and death, thus shifting the focus from the crises of young adulthood to those of middle age.