When three coworkers in the same department begin a string of absences, the narrator finds her frustration mounting as her own workload grows. One day she is let in on their love triangle by Shimomura, a capable senior colleague who has been abandoned by her fiancé. Drawn into the orbit of Shimomura's inscrutable "dance"—impossible to read as grief or defiance—the narrator is forced to confront the opaque, inviolable interior of another person. A prize-winning debut novel set in the uneasy terrain of the Japanese workplace.

Today is the day I slap them both. An Akutagawa Prize-nominated debut that renders the murky disquiet of the modern workplace.

A graduate student of architecture who works part-time in male escort services moves from Tokyo to Amami Oshima and works as a tour guide, drawing on the island's dialect, folk songs, and a multilingual atmosphere of Japanese, English, and Chinese. The title is drawn from an essay by Shimao Toshio, and the work is praised for its unique, sensual prose that evokes the island's pervasive loneliness.

I walk down from my room to the sea. It begins just 345 steps from my front door.