Lonely Woman is a beautiful but bleak collection of five interwoven stories, each focusing on a different woman living in urban Tokyo. It is a breathtaking look at loneliness and isolation, and the fate of women in a society that chooses to ignore their individuality.

The five women in Takahashi's stories are all alone. Some are alone because of being widowed or abandoned, others are alone because the people who should be caring for them do not. The women all perceive themselves to be mad, because they cannot otherwise explain the wedge between themselves and the lively, bustling metropolis they live in.

In the first story, the widowed Sakiko comes to believe, or perhaps wish, that she is the neighbourhood arsonist, because it fulfils her craving for revenge on the world. In the second, a woman buys birds that she names after her dead husband's lovers, and then throttles them. The next story follows Ichiko, a woman both fascinated and terrified by a teen shoplifter at the shop where she works. In the fourth, Haruyo is tormented by, and wishes to torment, a former love returned from abroad. And in the final piece, Ruriko's close encounters with three suicidal men lead her to believe that she is a bringer of death, which helps her to explain the disappointments in her own life. Despite their inward anguish, all the women are outwardly sane, and Takahashi balances their inner lives with images of ordinary domesticity. The result is an intense feeling of dislocation between the women and the city that surrounds them

Lonely Woman is a brilliant book. There is a delicacy to Takahashi's prose that outlines the fragility of urban life. Her characters are hemmed in by the mass of humanity surrounding them, and because they are women, inner madness, rather than outward rebellion, is the only escape available to them. The apparent normality of their lives creates the impression that Takahashi's women could be any women, anywhere, and that universality gives Lonely Woman a reach far beyond its setting and characters. It is a fantastic observation on the fate of women in modern urbanised societies, and a book not to be missed.