Compelling women’s fiction in Japan hardly began with its two brightest contemporary stars, Mieko Kawakami and Sayaka Murata. Yoko Tawada won the Akutagawa Prize back in 1993 and her work is widely read outside Japan (Tawada has long lived in Germany and writes in German and Japanese). Yoko Ogawa won in 1990 for her novel Pregnancy…
About the author
David McNeill (PhD) is a professor at the Department of English Language, Communication and Cultures at Sacred Heart University in Tokyo. He was previously a correspondent for The Independent and The Economist newspapers and for The Chronicle of Higher Education and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times and other international publications. He is co-author of the book Strong in the Rain (with Lucy Birmingham) about the 2011 Tohoku disaster. He is an Asia-Pacific Journal editor and a long-term member of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
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