A piercingly beautiful and candid novel of love, sex and independence in 1920s Japan by a trailblazing Japanese writer.

As an older woman, Kazue looks back on her tumultuous younger years with piercing clarity. Growing up in a tiny Japanese mountain village at the start of the twentieth century, her life was shadowed by the demands and expectations of her troubled, alcoholic father. While she is still a young teenager, her family arranges for her to marry an older cousin; Kazue stays with the boy for only ten days before returning home alone.

This is the beginning of a life of questing independence, which will see Kazue forced to leave her home at eighteen following a love affair, going first to Korea and then to Tokyo. Driven by her impulses and an indomitable spirit of hope, Kazue moves from one relationship to another, hungry for experience. As her sense of identity and voice grows, she takes to writing as a means to live a life on her own terms.