When Haruka dies, she would like to be reborn as a planarian. No matter how many cells metastasize in her breast tissue, her body would rebuild, apathetic and anew. Fumio Yamamoto’s The Dilemmas of Working Women features five short stories, each with unique characters who question the purpose of money in their lives and romantic foibles somewhat foisted upon them.
So why a planarian? In the aptly titled story “Planarian,” Haruka, a recovering stage four breast cancer patient, poses an important question at a dinner with past coworkers: what would we want to change about ourselves if this body was not enough? After facing her own mortality, Haruka begins work at the sweet bean shop following a conversation with a hospital acquaintance, and struggles to find meaning behind the act, which reverberates through the collection’s female narrators. What is the point of working to make more money, to continue working to buy things with more money? And if part of one’s life force is cut off, will it continue to multiply and grow as a new organism if a planarian, or die out because we are human?
In the first story, “Naked,” we meet Izumi. Secluded to hermitage after divorcing her business partner and husband, she benched herself for two years from the game of work—a game she was quite good at playing. When her former subordinate, a man she refers to as “Little Ken,” waltzes back into her life he begins to tinker around with tasks like changing the light bulbs and ventilation, chores gone unnoticed while Izumi threw herself from one hobby to the next—sewing teddy bear clothes, knitting monsters, reading manga. While she tinkers with Little Ken’s heart, Izumi notices her close friend Asuka’s discomfort at the reversal in the two friends’ financial stability. As she begins to bond with Asuka’s children, putting her art skills to use, à la Allegra Goodman’s short story “La Vita Nuova,” Izumi ponders what it means to return to the workforce, and whether that’s a question better reserved for tomorrow.
As I trekked deeper into the world of The Dilemmas of Working Women, the layers between the female characters in the story thickened, specifically in “Here, Which Is Nowhere,” where Katō’s daughter, Hina, leaves home prematurely. As Katō, the narrator, is saddled with her husband’s decreased salary and her new part-time job, she begins to battle her own mother’s perceptions of their life and a daughter’s desire to break free. In this sense, Katō’s dilemma extends across two generations of women at work.
To some extent, the themes of financial dependability morph throughout the collection. For example, in the title story, the dilemma for Mito is not her own work, but her boyfriend Asaoko-kun’s lack of it. Still a psychology student, his financial dependence on his parents becomes a dilemma when he proposes marriage, then hounds Mito about it, simply because she stated she might want to get married by twenty-five. But plans evolve with age, and so do judgements; thus we witness the push and pull of a burgeoning workplace affair and romantic disentanglement—not for lack of money but for lack of independence.
As working women, Fumio Yamamoto’s narrators push into the bruise with analytical bluntness on questions that bubble to the surface at social gatherings and center on obsession with marriage, the game, and perhaps most of all whether new planarians will continue to sprout. The chronological arrangement takes the reader through stories featuring a range of employment, from part time to full, before a volta at the final piece, “A Tomorrow Full of Love.” Narrator and restaurateur Majima’s fascination with his employee Sumie’s palm-reading abilities and their allure feels more removed from the rest of the collection’s female narrators, as we are subjected to Sumie through a male gaze. The exact purpose of this piece remains uncertain for me as a reader, but one thesis I can muster: perhaps Sumie’s true dilemma is the way in which Majima misunderstands her and thus inhibits the reader’s ability to inhabit her narration—a job that a reader might apply for but hear no response.
FICTION
The Dilemmas of Working Women: Stories
By Fumio Yamamoto
Translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom
HarperVia
Published August 12, 2025
