EXCERPTS & WRITING

In 2004, novelist Hitomi Kanehara shot onto the Japanese literary scene and won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize at age twenty with her first novel Snakes and Earrings. Making headlines as one of the youngest writers ever to be awarded the prize, she has continued to electrify Japanese readers with her unflinching portrayals of emotional and social unravelling, often of young women who struggle to break free of their expected roles in contemporary Japan. Over the span of twenty years, she has amassed a compelling body of award-winning novels, short story collections and essay collections, including the short story collection Unsocial Distance, for which she was awarded the distinguished Junichiro Tanizaki Literary Prize in 2021.  

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Read an excerpt from Unsocial Distance here.