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"Carter was intrigued by folk and fairy tales, which she both translated and reinterpreted. Carter is widely known for her fearless examination of 'forbidden' topics such as pornography, sexual fetish, rape, incest, and cannibalism. Carter's work embraces anarchy and champions the weak and disadvantaged.

"A Souvenir of Japan," and "Flesh and the Mirror," Both were written in Japan, are set in Japan, and were written on paper months after Carter's divorce from her first husband. Never again would Carter commit such a personal account to fiction, certainly not in a manner that would so perfectly mirror her own situation at a particular time: a female, first person narrator coping with loss, with the ironies and inequalities of relationships.
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A Souvenir of Japan" describes a British woman's affair with a Japanese man whose name is Taro, after the Kabuki story of Mamo-taro, "who was born from a peach." Taro too "had the inhuman sweetness of a child born from something other than a mother, a passive, cruel sweetness I did not immediately understand, for it was that of the repressed masochism which, in my country, is usually confined to women..."
The story, in its evocation of culture clash – between men and women even more than between Japan and England – is deadly. The narrator must objectify her lover before he can objectify her, so as not to lose her own sense of self: "I knew him only in relation to myself," "At times I thought I was inventing him as I went along," "...it is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all." And here she frames the crucial and enervating core of many relationships: that women accept their status as objects in return for their mates' passionate attention, the man's appreciation of the woman as a body which gives him pleasure. 
Carter's description of the unabashedly male-dominated Japanese culture ("In the department store there was a rack of dresses labeled 'For young and