The stories in “The Death of a Certain Woman” originally appeared across several different Japanese collections, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and I assembled them into a single volume. I first met Inoue in 1988, to discuss the possibility of translating his historical novel “The Memoirs of the Priest Honkaku,” which featured the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyū, who is said to have also been involved in political intrigue.