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Latest reviews

"Throughout The Nakano Thrift Shop, Kawakami expertly draws readers in, playing off our expectations, subverting them to unpack the complex, often messy, lives of her characters."
— Ploughshares, Oct 21 2021

THE TEN LOVES OF NISHINO is a finalist for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize!
— PEN America, Jan 28 2020
“Translator Powell, who is responsible for five of Kawakami’s seven-thus-far Japanese-to-English imports, enables savvy readers another opportunity to admire Kawakami’s agile, inventive fiction.”
— Booklist, Aug 9 2019
“The women in this collection are vibrant, lusty, and clearly the agents of their own love lives.”
— Kirkus Reviews, Jun 17 2019
“[Nishino is] the Don Draper of Japanese Fiction, the sort of person everyone knows without ever really knowing.”
— Wall Street Journal, Jun 14 2019
“The Ten Loves of Nishino is a neat little semi-ronde of a novel, quite well balanced between the man at its center and the women here who reveal themselves, and him, in their various portrait-reminiscences.”
— Complete Review, May 25 2019
“It’s a short, subtle, and funny book that quietly upends notions of the demure Japanese woman searching for a salaryman husband.”
— Quartz, May 8 2019
“...you can really sink into this endlessly charming book.”
— BookRiot, Jun 13 2018
“. . .the tortured relationship at the center of The Nakano Thrift Shop is a love story for contemporary Japan.”
— OZY, Jun 4 2018
THE NAKANO THRIFT SHOP is a “slow-burning, bittersweet story”
— Asian American Writers Workshop: The Margins, Dec 21 2017
THE NAKANO THRIFT SHOP is “a beautiful celebration of everyday life” and “a novel you read to discover the beauty in the ordinary.”
— April Magazine, Dec 15 2017
"Episodic in structure but as off-beat, unexpected, and meandering as a stroll through your favorite thrift shop, this book is a delightful, character-driven slice of life."
— Texas Book Festival, Dec 13 2017
Allison Markin Powell's translation of THE NAKANO THRIFT SHOP by Hiromi Kawakami was named one of “75 Notable Translations of 2017.” See the full list in World Literature Today.
— World Literature Today, Dec 12 2017
“The novel presents a fine-grained portrayal of its characters’ lives [...] [T]he pleasures of THE NAKANO THRIFT SHOP [...] revolve [...] around the granular details of the everyday.”
— The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov 27 2017
“[THE NAKANO THRIFT SHOP] captures an untranslatable Japanese mood.”
— New York Times Book Review, Aug 11 2017
“Wonderfully translated by Allison Markin Powell, it offers fascinating insight into Japanese culture . . . ”
— Huffington Post, Jul 16 2017
“A gentle, humorous novel...Kawakami transforms the relationship [between the book’s protagonists] from childlike curiosity and sexual desire to deeper forms of love and appreciation.”
— The Wall Street Journal, Jun 16 2017
Recommended for the armchair traveler as one of “seven new novels that will take you around the globe.”
— TIME, Jun 16 2017
“Hiromi Kawakami’s charming novel illuminates moments of kindness, love and friendship that pop up like unexpected treasures”
— The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Jun 6 2017

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