Excerpt
Minae Mizumura is one of the most important novelists writing in Japan today. Born in Tokyo, she moved with her family to Long Island, New York, when she was twelve. She studied French literature at Yale College and Yale Graduate School. Her other novels to date are
Zoku meian (Light and Darkness Continued), a sequel to the unfinished classic Light and Darkness by Natsume Soseki, and the autobiographical
Shishosetsu (An “I” Novel from Left to Right). She lives in Tokyo.
Juliet Carpenter studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. Carpenter’s translation of Kobo Abe’s novel Secret Rendezvous won the 1980 Japan–United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.