Mieko Kawakami, translated by Hitomi Yoshio and Laurel Taylor

Mieko Kawakami is the acclaimed author of the internationally best-selling novel Breasts and Eggs, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of Time’s Best 10 Books of 2020. Her other novels, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, include Heaven, shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize, and All the Lovers in the Night, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. In 2024, Sisters in Yellow won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Her books, translated into over forty languages, are known for their insights into the female body, and philosophical questions surrounding gender, class, and ethics in modern society. Born in Osaka, Kawakami lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Laurel Taylor is a translator, poet, and researcher. Her translation of Maiko Seo's Someone to Cook For is forthcoming, and she has also translated works by Kaori Fujino, Minae Mizumura, Tomoko Shibasaki, and Aoko Matsuda, among others. Her first book of poetry, Human Construct, was published in 2024. Taylor researches the intersections of technology and literature in the early Internet age and teaches courses on translation, Japanese literature, and Japanese language at the University of Denver.

Hitomi Yoshio is the translator of Natsuko Imamura’s This Is Amiko, Do You Copy? and co-translator of Mieko Kawakami’s Ashes of Spring and Sisters in Yellow. Her short story translations have appeared in Granta, Freeman’s, Words without Borders, Monkey, World Literature Today, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, and The Penguin Book of the International Short Story. She received her PhD from Columbia University, and is professor of Global Japanese Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo.