Blue Moon | Hiromi Kawakami | Granta Magazine

Blue Moon

Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Lucy North

‘Rather than death itself, it is the disappearance of traces that seems unbearable and sad. The disappearance of all signs that I existed.’

Hiromi Kawakami

Born in 1958 in Tokyo, HIROMI KAWAKAMI is one of Japan's most popular contemporary novelists. She is the recipient of the Pascal Short Story Prize for New Writers and the Akutagawa Prize. Her novel Drowning won both the Ito Sei Literature Award and Joryu Bungaku Sho (Women Writers' Prize) in 2000. Her novel Manazuru won the 2011 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize. Strange Weather in Tokyo (Sensei no kaban) won the Tanizaki prize in 2001 and was shortlisted for both the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

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Translated by Lucy North

Lucy North has translated over half a dozen modern and contemporary Japanese writers, including Taeko Kono, Fumiko Enchi, Takako Takahashi, Hiroko Oyamada and Hiromi Kawakami.

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