Diary of an Empty Heart

Author's name: My mother Yaji

Shibata, a single woman in her mid-thirties, works for a company that manufactures paper tubes. Her colleagues expect her to perform small, unrelated tasks, such as making coffee and cleaning up after meetings, simply because she is a woman.

One day, she gets fed up when she sees the dirty cups that her colleagues have left for hours without even thinking about cleaning them, and declares that she cannot clean them because she is pregnant and the smell makes her nauseous.

This spontaneous lie frees her from the tasks she hates and even enables her to finish her work on time, so she decides to continue her lie until the end.

The novel has been translated into more than eighteen languages, has gained immense popularity around the world, and has won the Osamu Dazai Prize.