My Beautiful Shadow

'I have a secret. I belong to a club. And my club is the biggest, best kept secret in all of Tokyo. You can call my club the beauty lovers' club.' Kayo is a young Tokyo housewife and mother. Outwardly, she is no different from other young mothers. But she has a secret. She belongs to a kind of a club. It involves beautiful clothes and accessories and is the most important thing in their lives. The club makes it possible for Kayo to escape the tedium of her life, and to embrace a dazzling new world. But it quickly becomes an obsession, a drug, the way to both paradise and hell. Can she find her way out of the dark underworld of debt, lies and prostitution? Or is she doomed to exchange one form of loneliness for another? A deeply absorbing novel about the 'holes' that suddenly appear in women's lives, My Beautiful Shadow is also a powerful cautionary tale about consumerism gone mad.