Mieko Kawakami

Kawakami was born in Osaka on August 29, 1976.

Kawakami worked as a hostess and bookstore clerk, before embarking on a singing career.[1] Kawakami released three albums, but she quit her musical career in 2006 to focus on writing.[2]

Subsequently, Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006, and she published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, in 2007. Before winning the Akutagawa Prize in 2008 for Breasts and Eggs, Kawakami was known in Japan primarily as a blogger.[1] At its peak, her popular blog received over 200,000 hits per day.[3]

In 2010, Kawakami's first full-length novel, Heaven, won the Murasaki Shikibu Prize for Literature.[4] In 2012, an English translation of her short story "March Yarn" appeared in March was Made of Yarn, which is a collection of essays and stories about the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.[5]

From 2015 to 2017, Kawakami conducted a series of interviews with Haruki Murakami, in which she notably asked him about women and sexualization in his novels.[6] The edited volume of these interviews, titled Mimizuku wa Tasogare ni Tobitatsu (みみずくは黄昏に飛びたつ, Haruki Murakami: A Long, Long Interview) was published in 2017. During this same period, Kawakami was selected as a 2016 Granta Best of Young Japanese Novelists for her short story "Marie's Proof of Love."[7]

Kawakami's novel, Ms Ice Sandwich, made the shortlist of the 2018 edition of the Grand Prix of Literary Associations.[8] In 2019, Kawakami published Summer Stories, a considerably expanded version of her novella Breasts and Eggs and received the 73rd Mainichi Publication Culture Award.

In 2020, the English translation of Summer Stories was published by Europa Editions. The New York Times ran a review by Katie Kitamura on the day of publication, in which she observes, "Mieko Kawakami writes with a bracing lack of sentimentality, particularly when describing the lives of women."

Her 2022 book, All the Lovers in the Night, was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction.[9]

Kawakami's writing often employs Osaka dialect, which is a distinctive Japanese dialect spoken in Osaka and surrounding cities. She also incorporates experimental and poetic language into her short stories and novels, citing Lydia Davis and James Joyce as literary influences.[2] Her writing is known for its poetic qualities and its insights into the female body, ethical questions, and the dilemmas of modern society.

Japanese author, Haruki Murakami, called her his favorite young novelist[10] and has described her writing as "ceaselessly growing and evolving".[11][12]

In addition to the awards noted above, Kawakami has also received the following:

• 2007 Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers for Watakushi ritsuin hā, mata wa sekai (My Ego Ratio, My Teeth, and the World)[13]
• 2008 Chūya Nakahara Prize for Sentan de, sasuwa sasareruwa sora eewa[14]
• 2008 Akutagawa Prize for Breasts and Eggs[15]
• 2010 Murasaki Shikibu Prize for Heaven[4]
• 2013 Tanizaki Prize for Ai no Yume toka (Dreams of Love, etc.)[16]
• 2016 Watanabe Junichiro Prize for Akogare (Yearning)[17]
• 2019 Mainichi Publication Culture Award for Summer Stories

Kawakami lives in Tokyo, Japan.

• Official website