The choice of the English title The Waiting Years in place of the original Onnazaka, the name of the long ascending road to the heroine's hilltop estate, is interesting. The sensitive and subtle author would not have used these words that so starkly define the oppressed wife's existence. She preferred the symbolism of the arduous path to describe her life….

[The Waiting Years] is certainly one of the greatest works of the [Japanese] postwar era, subtle, sensitive, insightful and moving. The characters are palpably presented, and the unaffected prose resonates with carefully chosen images and sounds…. The Waiting Years is an outstanding addition to the canon of Japanese literature in English translation.

Emiko Sakurai, in a review of "The Waiting Years," in World Literature Today, Vol. 55, No. 4, Autumn, 1981, p. 728.