Widely regarded as a true cult author far beyond the borders of Japan, Mieko Kawakami (Osaka) began her artistic career as a singer and songwriter before turning to literature. With Breasts and Eggs (E/O, 2020), a story about women imbued with a distinctive mix of humor and emotional depth, she delivers an international bestseller named amongst the ten best books of 2020 by Time magazine. Earlier, thanks to the novella that the novel expands upon, Kawakami won the Akutagawa Prize, the highest literary honor in Japan. Her other novels include Heaven, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, and All the Lovers in the Night, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2023. In 2024, her most recent novel, Sisters in Yellow—soon to be published in Italy as well—won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Her works, translated into forty languages, are known for their exploration of the female body and their philosophical inquiries into themes of gender, social class, and ethics in modern society.

(photo: © Reiko Toyama)