Mieko Kawakami

Kawakami grew up in a working-class single-parent household in Osaka and held a string of jobs as a teenager before pursuing a career as a pop singer, releasing several albums under her own name. She began writing online, publishing poetry and blog essays before turning to fiction.

A novella version of Breasts and Eggs won the Akutagawa Prize in 2008; she expanded it into a full novel in 2019, following a single mother, her daughter, and her sister's fixation on breast augmentation surgery with a directness about the female body rare in Japanese letters. Haruki Murakami has publicly praised her work and sat for a long, widely read published conversation with her.

She has continued writing fiction centered on class, motherhood, and bodily autonomy, becoming one of the most prominent voices of her literary generation in Japan.