CHICK lit, like chick flicks, seldom receives critical respect. There is good reason, given the amount of demeaning dribble masquerading as entertainment.

But once in a while, a stellar example of the genre reminds one that chick lit, which focuses on the feminine, can offer satisfying insights into the state of womanhood.

Mitsuyo Kakuta's Woman On The Other Shore is one such example. Freshly translated into English, this 2005 Japanese novel won the Naoki Prize, a 47-year-old award given annually to the best popular fiction in Japan.

Sayoko, 35, is mother to a shy three-year-old girl, Akari. Bored by the cloistered circle of mothers in playgrounds, the housewife decides to go back to work.

The story of her return to the workplace unfolds alongside a subplot which follows her unconventional boss, Aoi, through a period of adolescent upheaval.

Plot-wise, nothing very much seems to happen. A housewife gets a job. A teenage girl forms a close friendship with another girl.

What gives the story traction is its attention to the details. The book is a minutely intimate portrait of two very different women, both confined by social norms and struggling to redefine their identities in ways that would satisfy both themselves and the society around them.

Sayoko is the prototypical middle-class Japanese housewife. But her dissatisfaction with the role is also limned with worries that she is not living up to the expectations of her husband, mother-in-law and other mothers in her social circle.

Aoi is unconventional by Sayoko's standards because she is an entrepreneur in the male-dominated business world. She is impulsive, prone to snap decisions and more volatile, qualities advantageous in the fast-moving world of business but a drawback in the more reserved environs of social relations.

Kakuta's strength as a writer is her sympathetic understanding of her characters. She writes plainly, but with a keen eye, about the small things in ordinary life: How a husband's occasional indifference can sting; how a mother-in-law's cutting remarks can demoralise and how colleagues gossiping can cause insecurity.

These may seem petty, but the writer understands that they matter to her readership, presumably mostly female, who have to deal with these things on a daily basis.

The evocative title suggests distance, but this book is built on the same understanding behind the age-old saying that there, but for the grace of God, go I.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WOMAN ON THE OTHER SHORE

By Mitsuyo Kakuta, translated by
Wayne P. Lammers
Kodansha International/ Hardcover/271 pages/
$36.14 (without GST)/
Books Kinokuniya/*** 1/2