Single Sickness and Other Stories (Paperback or Softback)

Here is a collection of short stories by the contemporary woman writer Masuda Mizuko, who has been writing actively since the late 1970s and is anthologized in major collections of Japanese women's literary writing, such as Josei sakka shirizu. Throughout her writing, Masuda examines themes of selfhood and autonomy, loneliness and desire, and the deep tensions in female-male relations. Her fiction explores issues of female subjectivity and female biology in ways that are unique and intriguing. These collected stories illustrate the powerful way Masuda's fiction taps into an undercurrent of disquiet and loneliness that pervades contemporary urban society in Japan.

Masuda Mizuko was born in 1948 in Tokyo. She is a prolific writer who has received some of Japan's most prestigious literary awards, including the Noma New Writers Award, the Izumi Kyoka Prize, the Ministry of Education Fine Arts Award, and the Ito Sei Literary Prize.

Lynne Kutsukake is a writer, translator, and former Japanese studies librarian at the University of Toronto. She was a finalist for the Writer's Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Literary Prize.