Under the Eye of the Big Bird

No other book of hers convinces me more that Kawakami used to be a teacher of chemistry. A sad but beautiful depiction of a perishing world – Banana YoshimotoThere’s real satisfaction in figuring out how the chapters connect, and all are richly imagined * Telegraph *Haunting… it offers a powerful corrective to the assumption of human primacy * Guardian *

HIROMI KAWAKAMI was born in Tokyo in 1958. In 2001 she won the Tanizaki Prize for Strange Weather in Tokyo, which became an international bestseller and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 International Foreign Fiction Prize. Her other fiction in translation includes The Nakano Thrift Shop, The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino, People from My Neighbourhood, and The Third Love. Kawakami has contributed to editions of Granta in both the UK and Japan and is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary novelists.

ASA YONEDA is the translator of books including Picnic in the Storm by Yukiko Motoya, The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, and Idol, Burning by Rin Usami, as well as stories by Natsuko Kuroda, Atsushi Nakajima, and (with David Boyd) Midori Osaki.