Hen'ai shōsetsushū

Sayaka Murata (村田沙耶香) is a Japanese novelist and short-story writer, born on 14 August 1979 in Inzai, Chiba Prefecture. She worked part-time as a convenience store clerk in Tokyo for eighteen years, until 2017, and drew on that experience for the novel that made her name internationally. Her fiction returns to nonconformity, gender roles, reproduction and sexuality, often pushing everyday social expectation to a disquieting extreme. She won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 2003 for her de...

Yōko Tawada (多和田葉子) is a Japanese writer who has lived in Germany since 1982 and writes in both Japanese and German. Born in Tokyo in 1960, she read Russian literature at Waseda University, later taking a master's degree in contemporary German literature at the University of Hamburg and a doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich; she has been based in Berlin since 2006. Her fiction, poetry, plays and essays turn on language, translation and displacement, and include *The B...

Yukiko Motoya is a Japanese author known for her distinctive voice and stories that blend the strange with the everyday. Her collections include Hen'ai shōsetsushū and the translated The lonesome bodybuilder. She often explores themes of identity and the absurd.

Hiromi Kawakami writes fiction that often mixes the quiet details of daily life with elements of the strange or surreal. She is best known for the novel The Briefcase and the speculative work To Not Be Carried Away by a Large Bird. Her stories frequently explore human connections through a lens of magical realism and understated emotion.