Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a heavily pregnant young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a brief casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow to her parents. For Takiko, however, it is a natural state of being, even a cause for reverie. Unsuited to the typical domesticity of motherhood, Takiko sets out to raise her son Akira on her own terms, struggling as a single mother to find a job that will pay for his daycare and allow her to begin saving for her own apartment, away from her abusive and shaming parents. A porousness of self and surroundings attends Takiko's first year as a mother, filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn, learning how to make room for Akira, how to accommodate him physically, emotionally, and psychologically. First published in Japan in 1980, Woman Running in the Mountains is as urgent and necessary an account today of the experience of the female body and of a woman's right to self-determination.