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Kiyoko Murata
🇯🇵Japan
Kiyoko Murata writes about women navigating the intersections of desire, commerce, and autonomy. A Woman of Pleasure — set in a Nagasaki brothel during the Meiji era — is a richly textured historical novel that refuses to reduce its protagonist to victimhood, instead portraying her as a woman of fierce intelligence and complex agency. Murata's prose style has a tactile quality, attentive to fabric, food, weather, and skin, grounding her historical setting in sensory reality. The novel earned widespread acclaim for its unflinching yet compassionate portrayal of sex work in imperial Japan.
