The collection includes three short stories: THE HOUR OF THE CAT. PLAYING WITH YOUR FINGERS. DEMONSTRATION OF HELL Eimi Yamala was born in Tokyo in 1959. She studied at the Faculty of Philology at Meiji University. While still a student, she began writing comics and even abandoned her studies for them, but she soon realized that it was impossible to fully express her individuality through comics. Since 1980, Yamala begins to write serious prose. The story “The Hour of the Cat” became her debut work. Yamala literally burst into Japanese literature, winning the prestigious Bungay Magazine Prize (1985). The stories included in this collection, “The Hour of the Cat,” “Playing with Fingers,” and “Fiend of Hell,” expressed the spirit of the “lost generation X” with its frantic passion for the underground, drugs and “slacker” (in modern parlance, not giving a fuck) attitude to life. The recurring motif of Japanese heroines' love for African-Americans has a distinctly shocking character, since adultery with a foreigner, especially a black man, is to this day considered in Japan a scandalous deviation from the traditional way of life.