Overview
The Ikiru Book Prize–winning collection of diaries from a homeless woman in Tokyo, recording her relationships, daily experiences, and dreams of a better future.
In early 2000s Tokyo, middle-aged Koyama-san has slipped through the economic cracks of a contracting economy and now lives with her domineering partner in the “Blue Tent Village” homeless community in a major city park. When money and health allow, she visits coffee shops, where she records her thoughts in notebooks: reflections on her daily joys and struggles, on the currents of violence in her relationship, on her dreams of one day living and writing in a Paris apartment, and on her own personal transformation via her life in the park: “How much more complex my inner life has become . . . I’m free, and at the same time, unfree.”
Recovered and posthumously edited by a feminist collective led by women who knew the author, this Ikiru Book Prize–winning collection gathers Koyama-san’s notebooks, which reveal a startling parallel economic world within Tokyo and the practices of compassion, grace, and resilience by which one woman endured it.
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