The Dilemmas of Working Women: The Japanese Bestseller English 2025

The Dilemmas of Working Women is a sharp, witty, and deeply insightful novel by Japanese writer Fumio Yamamoto, published in English for the first time in 2025. One of Japan’s bestselling and most influential works, it portrays the lives of five ordinary women, each grappling with her own professional, emotional, and social dead ends.

With a candid, humorous, and empathetic prose style, Yamamoto examines workplace pressures, economic insecurity, draining relationships, and the loneliness faced by women in modern Japanese society. The book’s short yet interconnected narratives offer a humane and multilayered portrait of women caught between social expectations and personal desires. The Dilemmas of Working Women is both funny and unsettling, and thanks to its emotional honesty and critical perspective, it remains fresh and highly relatable decades after its original publication.

Winner of the prestigious Naoki Prize in Japan, the novel is now available to a global readership in a translation by Brian Bergstrom. It is an outstanding choice for readers interested in contemporary Japanese literature, women-centered narratives, and socially engaged fiction.