Intimate Encounters is the first 'thick description' of the on-going changes wrought by the recent entry of a non-Japanese population, i.e., Filipina women, into rural Japanese life. It broadens and deepens our understanding of what it might mean to write transnational, diasporic histories.—Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines"Intimate Encounters is fascinating on a topic both timely and important: cultural encounters at the crossroads of global capital, transnational migration, and national meaning-making. Examining the migratory travel routes of women struck by the desire or need to pursue greater prosperity elsewhere, Faier distinguishes her account by beautiful prose, deft ethnography, and a keen attentiveness to the role played by—and complexity of—desire."—Anne Allison, author of Millennial Monsters and Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan