Waiting Years, The: A Novel - Fumiko Enchi

This is an unnerving portrait of women caught in a web of shifting relationships within an upper-class family in the years following the Meiji Restoration. The beautiful, immature girl whom she took home to her husband was a maid only in name. Tomo's real mission had been to find him a mistress. Nor did her secret humiliation end there. The web that his insatiable lust spun about him soon trapped another young woman, and another ... and the relationships between the women thus caught were to form, over the years, a subtle, shifting pattern in which they all played a part.