Hardboiled & Hard Luck

A collection of two novellas, Hardboiled & Hard Luck concerns two young women making sense of the past. In "Hardboiled," the narrator is hiking in the mountains, reminiscing about an old lover—the only lesbian relationship the narrator ever had—who is now dead. In a dream, she is visited by her ex-lover, who berates her for forgetting the anniversary of her death. Later that night, a woman knocks on her hotel room door, saying that she was locked out of her room by her married lover. The woman turns out to be the ghost of a woman who killed herself in the hotel. The narrator dreams again of her old lover, with a sense of closure.

In "Hard Luck," a woman tells the story of her sister, who has been in a coma for a long time. Although her fiancée broke the engagement, his older brother Sakai kept coming to the hospital to visit. There is a touching scene where the sister appears to respond when the narrator and Sakai peel tangerines, which the sister loved. The narrator is now in graduate school, studying Italian literature, preparing to go to Italy. She is drawn to Sakai, and it turns out that the feelings are mutual. The narrator goes to her sister's old company to get her things. Everyone is crying. The narrator talks with her father. Her sister dies and is cremated. The ex-fiancé comes to the funeral, and there is a tragic bittersweet reconciliation between the two families. The narrator has a final conversation with Sakai in which it seems he may come to Italy.