Portraits of girls and women of all ages in Japan, taken between the early 1990s and the early 2000s. In the afterword Yoshio Mizoguchi writes that at some point he had come to think of women as comparable to fireflies (hotaru); when the sweet nectar of his youth was gone he took up a camera as his new firefly scoop and set out to catch new fireflies, and he had been shooting them for 35 years, hoping to convey that passion and the subtle sensuality that women possess. The photographs show girls playing on the beach, older women in kimonos on a shopping trip, a woman provocatively raising her leg, another showing only her face with her body hidden behind a tree; together they weave a complex, if incomplete, image of the many lives women lead in Japan.