Celia recommends The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya and Toddler Hunting and Other Stories by Taeko Kono:

How does one describe the peculiar incisive gentleness of Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder? It might happen, for instance, that you’re a shop girl in a fancy boutique, and you have a customer who’s having trouble deciding what dress to buy. It might happen that she refuses to come out of her dressing room, that you bring everything in the store for her to try on, that the hour gets late, the store closes, you stay all night with her, never seeing what she looks like. It might happen that, while this is obviously a rather shitty job you have, staying late to help a customer who doesn’t realize that the store is closing and she needs to leave, what you mostly feel is a deep sympathy for this woman whose body is not made for the kind of clothes you carry, who is too humiliated to come out of the changing cubicle. It might happen that this woman is not a woman, but a kind of giant slug. There is clothing for her, the kind that would make her look beautiful, but it’s not the kind of clothing you sell. You tried your best, and nothing worked, but nothing is irremediably broken.

But maybe you’re the kind of person who likes it when things are irremediably broken? In that case, you really ought to read Toddler Hunting by Taeko Kono. These are vivid, sad, violent stories about being trapped in a senseless world. Her narrators are women, mostly, unhappy in the sphere of marriage, motherhood and domesticity, fearlessly or timidly seeking out the externalization of suffering through masochism or humiliation or flirting with death. And yet these aren’t entirely nihilistic stories either. Take the ending of the opening story “Night Journey,” for instance, in which a husband and wife—they seem, at first, to be quite happily married—walk out into the night after a disappointment that neither of them are able to speak about. They stop, occasionally. To look at a house under construction, to wait silently in a graveyard. It can’t end well, and yet isn’t it thrilling, this unknown world of night, this place in which neither of them have ever set foot? It’s not safe, no, but in the end you might think you see the narrow path out of the slow suffocation of daily life.