Showing results by author "Mieko Kawakami" in All Categories

Award-winning Japanese author and poet Mieko Kawakami brings Ashes of Spring, a collection of short stories set in everyday life in Japan just before the pandemic lockdown.

From the International Booker Prize Shortlisted author of Heaven and Breasts and Eggs Hana has nothing but she's hopeful. She's fifteen years old. She lives in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko...

On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter, Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast-enhancement surgery. She's accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsu’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties.

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.

Ein Brief, den ich Ihnen geschrieben habe, als ich im Krankenhaus war – "Ao over blue". Zwei Frauen, die sich in einem Luxushotel einem Vorstellungsgespräch unterziehen, um bezahlt zu werden – "Wenn Ihre Nase nur etwas größer wäre." Eine alte Frau im Sterben und eine Haushälterin mit großem Rücken – "Vase". Ein Schriftsteller mit genau demselben Geburtsdatum wie Sie begeht Selbstmord – "Ruf mich an, wenn Sie sich einsam fühlen." Meine Freundin und ich haben uns in eine Abendschule geschlichen und nach einem wichtigen Brief gesucht – "Blue Ink".

'With Sisters in Yellow, [Kawakami] proves she is still the most exciting Japanese novelist at work today' The Times From the International Booker Prize-Shortlisted author of Heaven and Breasts and Eggs. Hana has nothing but she’s hopeful. She’s fifteen years old. She lives in a tiny...

From Mieko Kawakami, award-winning author of Breasts and Eggs, comes a bold novel of sacrifice and the tumultuous bonds of sisterhood, set in the gritty Tokyo of the 1990s. “I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami.” —Haruki Murakami “To...