Fuyuko Irie, a freelance proofreader, spends her days looking for errors in manuscripts. She’s in her mid-thirties, lives alone and is almost entirely friendless. Other women make fun of her, for her drab appearance, for her unsociable nature, and, by implication, for her failure to make the efforts that convention dictates she ought to make: to please the boss, to flirt with men, to make herself prettier, and to follow that unrelenting diet of self-improvement served up in magazines and social media. Is she broken or damaged in some way, or is she simply refusing to play the game? As her isolation deepens and her dependence on alcohol increases, Fuyuko has a chance encounter with the enigmatic Mitsutsuka …

What ingredients need to be present for a happy life? Friendship, love, fulfilling work, purpose? What propels us forward and what sustains us when these are absent or when they stop being enough? Mieko Kawakami doesn’t shy away from important themes, but her delicate and oblique approach to them, her curiosity about how individuals confront or avoid them, and, most of all, the spareness and beauty of her style, make her one of the most interesting novelists at work today.