Mieko Kawakami

Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important Japanese authors of her generation and among the most significant international literary voices of the past decade. Born in Osaka in 1976, she worked as a hostess and singer before turning to fiction, and her Osaka working-class background gives her writing a groundedness and an anger entirely different from the polished surfaces of much Tokyo literary fiction.

Her novella Breasts and Eggs (2008) won the Akutagawa Prize and generated significant controversy in Japan for its unflinching treatment of female bodies, reproductive choice, and the economic pressures that shape women's decisions. Expanded into a full novel and published in English in 2020 (in Sam Bett and David Boyd's translation), it became an international sensation. Her subsequent novel Heaven, about school bullying and the philosophical responses of two children who become friends in their shared suffering, demonstrated her range. She has also published a major series of interviews with Haruki Murakami on fiction and feminism.