Hiromi Kawakami

Hiromi Kawakami is one of Japan's most adored contemporary novelists, a writer whose fiction moves between the fantastical and the domestic with characteristic serenity, finding in both registers a capacity for sudden, piercing emotion. Her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo (Sensei no Kaban, 2001) — a gentle, wandering love story between a middle-aged woman and her elderly former schoolteacher conducted over bottles of sake in a small Tokyo bar — won the Ito Sei Literary Prize and became an international success.

Her subsequent works — The Ten Loves of Nishino, Record of a Night Too Brief, People from My Neighbourhood (a delightful collection of micro-fictions) — have confirmed her as a writer of extraordinary tonal range, equally at home in fable and realism, always attentive to the strangeness that animates ordinary life. She is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Japanese literature.