As one of the most renowned writers of her country, Enchi Fumiko received more literary prizes than any other woman writer in postwar Japan. While her literary achievements include plays, essays, and translations of many Japanese classics into the modern language, the core of her writing is the fiction she created during the last fifty years of her life. Women are the focus of these works, and Enchi's works are noted for their representations of the lives of these women. She depicts a variety of characters, yet one theme unites her women: the pursuit of the self and its expression. The majority of her stories are set in the twentieth century, and the age and struggles of each of the main characters frequently match Enchi's own. She associates sexuality--and, in her later works, the problems of aging--with self-identity and self-expression, and she thus exposes the hidden world of...