The second component of the book’s power is less wholesome. It only takes several pages for Eiko to lay out her regimen — you do two minute-long exercises a day, one wherein you lie on your back and pull your outstretched leg backward with a towel and then bounce, and another where you do a legs-spread sumo stretch and then bounce. A third minute-long yoga position or exercise changes each week. Eiko recommends that, with any move, you push yourself to 70 percent of your capacity.

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

But the bulk of the book consists of a slightly strange short story — “How Are You Going to Achieve Anything If You Can’t Even Do the Splits?” — about two shame-ridden employees of a corporation in Japan who discover the joys and benisons of shake yoga. The gentle Oba is being outworked and outplayed by his younger colleagues, and harried Umemoto fears her work has deteriorated because of poor time management skills and a lack of self-restraint. But Oba and Umemoto’s lives change dramatically when their new boss Hori encourages them to start meeting in the conference room at 7:30 a.m., where they cover the floor with some “picnic sheets for cherry-blossom parties” and then stretch and bounce their way to a new life — the kind of life that’s led by people who can do the splits. “That sparkle you feel, that sense of respect,” as Hori puts it, “ … is something you reserve for the kind of people who keep on trying to accomplish something that most people can’t.”

Asked why she chose to highlight professional shame and embarrassment in the short story, Eiko responded, “Whether or not you can do the splits is a battle with your own insecurities. Many of the people who buy the book have an inferiority complex because they’ve been inflexible ever since they were children. Many Japanese people have inferiority complexes about not being able to speak English or about being overweight, and lots of people feel the same way about being inflexible. For people like that, being able to do the splits means changing their ‘no-good self’ into something good.”