God Bless You, 2011 | Hiromi Kawakami | Granta Magazine

God Bless You, 2011

Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Ted Goossen & Motoyuki Shibata

‘If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans broke the laws of nature to turn gods into minions?’ Hiromi Kawakami on the nature gods of Japan.

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.

More about the author →

Translated by Ted Goossen

Ted Goossen is Professor of Japanese Literature at York University in Toronto and has translated many writers including Haruki Murakami.

More about the translator →

Translated by Motoyuki Shibata

More about the translator →