Banana Yoshimoto's depiction of the lives of Japanese youth has changed her country's literature and earned her international acclaim. In Hardboiled & Hard Luck, she delivers two tales of resonant grace, of young women coming to terms with change and heartbreak.

In Hardboiled the narrator is hiking in the mountains on an anniversary she has forgotten about, the anniversary of her ex-lover's death. As she nears her hotel, a sense of haunting falls over her. That night she dreams of her ex-lover, and is visited by a woman who may not exist-perhaps these eerie events will help her make peace with her loss. "Hard Luck" is about a young woman whose sister is dying and lies in a coma. Her fiance left her after the accident, but his brother continues to visit, and as the two of them make peace with the impending loss of their loved one, they seem to find new hope in the future of their own new bond.

Hardboiled & Hard Luck is a small jewel of a book, a work of resilient sweetness that will move readers deeply. BookPage has compared Yoshimoto to "Haruki Murakami [and] ... Anne Tyler [for her] spare and ethereal manner of writing and eye for the way in which terrible experience's shapes one's life," but Yoshimoto's voice, and deserved international stature, are most certainly her own. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.