Hollow Inside

Hirai is 38 and Suganuma is 42. They work together at the same unexciting company, and now they share a home too. Both are single, and neither is sure marriage is for her. Their salaries are too small to cover a one-bedroom flat each in the city, so they have settled into a shared household with its own rhythms, one that suits them better than the life people expect of women their age. It also leaves room for Suganuma's sideline: making 3D-printed figurines of dead pets for owners who miss them.

What holds the two together at first is a shared wariness about romantic love. Then things shift. Suganuma starts seeing someone in secret, and the news jolts Hirai out of her routine and back onto the dating apps. She goes on one perfectly acceptable, perfectly forgettable date after another. At office gatherings colleagues pry into her private life, and she keeps wondering whether she ought to go through egg freezing a second time. Everything around her seems drained of real connection, and she wants to know what could fill the emptiness she feels.

Asako Otani's debut is a dry, darkly comic novel that pokes at the myths and pressures that surround romance today. Its deadpan voice and sharp eye make a shrewd satire of how women are expected to live, while Hirai and Suganuma try to find their own way through an unstable world. It won the Subaru Prize in Japan, and readers who enjoy Sayaka Murata's offbeat humor will likely find a kindred spirit here.