With charmingly dry humor, these eleven stories take us inside the minds of ordinary women in Japan as they juggle life and work.

When a new acquaintance inspires more anxiety than excitement, Minori comes up with an excuse to cancel their plans. This small, seemingly harmless lie sets Minori on an unexpected path, and soon she's offering creative solutions to the social dilemmas of her niece, her niece's classmate, and even her own boss. At a certain point, she has to ask herself: Is all this lying worth the trouble? What if we were just honest with each other?

Struggling to overcome her bad habits with the help of an app, Ms. Iwasaki meets Ms. Nakayama, who has found a unique way to relieve stress in the employee parking lot. Ms. Kurata contends with the meanness of her younger colleagues as well as the sullen attitude of her high-school-aged son. Ms. Yokoi is responsible for organizing Mr. Maruoka's farewell party after forty-two years of work, but where do you take a man who's been out to drink more than two thousand times?

Shrewdly funny and deeply empathetic, Kikuko Tsumura's stories play up the absurdities of the modern world while capturing moments of genuine emotion and connection between women at different stages of life, searching for meaning.

Kikuko Tsumura is a writer from Osaka, Japan. She is the winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and numerous Japanese literary awards including the Dazai Osamu Prize, Noma Literary Prize, Akutagawa Prize, Oda Sakunosuke Prize, Kawabata Yasunari Literary Prize, Murasaki Shikibu Literary Prize, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize, and a New Artist award for There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job.

Yuki Tejima is a translator from the Japanese whose projects include Mizuki Tsujimura's Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon and How to Hold Someone in Your Heart, Kumi Kimura's Someone to Watch Over You, and Emi Yagi's When the Museum Is Closed, among others. Raised in California, she now divides her time between Los Angeles and Tokyo.