This study examines low fertility by focusing on the age at which Japanese women give birth for the first time and comparing this with the timing of first birth for Dutch women. It combines the life-history and life-story approaches, and makes use of a wide variety of source materials. The life-history approach shows that Japanese women increasingly reject the traditional sequence of marriage and motherhood, while the experience of Dutch women exhibits a broadening range of different partnership and living arrangement pathways to first birth. The results of the application of the life-story approach show that the postponement of first birth is unplanned and of a cumulative nature. Japanese women are confronted by conflicting signals from two different constructed images of motherhood, that of the ‘new’ self-realising individual, and that of the ‘old’ wife and mother. On the one hand in the post-industrial society, women are increasingly expected to work, while on the other hand, they are still expected to marry and give birth. The cover of this book shows the author when she was a child with her mother. The picture is personal but at the same time captures many dimensions of this research. It was taken in the early 1970s, a period already characterised by quite low fertility in Japan and coinciding with the entry into the Second Demographic Transition. It was also the time when the so-called industrial household came under increasing pressure. The picture conveys a dual sense of tradition and modernity. It symbolises the different worlds of a generation of ‘mothers’ and ‘daughters’.