Swallows

Twenty-nine-year-old Riki is sick of her dead-end job, of struggling to get by ever since she moved to Tokyo from the country. So when someone offers her the chance to become a surrogate in return for a life-changing amount of money, it's hard to turn down.

Retired ballet star Motoi and his wife, Yuko, have spent years trying to conceive. As Motoi grows increasingly desperate for a child, their last resort is surrogacy; a business transaction, plain and simple. But as they try to exert ever more control over Riki, their contract with her starts to slip through their fingers.

Vibrating with the injustices of class and gender, tradition and power, Swallows is an acerbic vision of contemporary Japan, and of a young woman's fight to preserve her dignity - at any cost.

Translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda