Summary

Chapter 1, “Are You Poor?” (5), opens from the perspective of a first-person narrator who turns out to be a woman named Natsuko. Natsuko says it is possible to determine how poor someone was growing up by how many windows they had. She was thinking about this because a young girl on the train reminded her of herself when she was younger. Natsuko was going to Tokyo Station, where she had first come ten years earlier, at the age of 20 in the year 1998. Her life in the past ten years had not changed much. She worked a minimum wage job and was an unpublished writer.

After it becomes clear that Natsuko was at Tokyo Station to meet someone named Makiko, her narration is interrupted by a journal entry signed “Midoriko” (8). Midoriko writes that women have “ova” (8), or eggs, which she did not know previously, although she...