FINALIST 2020 PEN AMERICA TRANSLATION PRIZE

Best-selling and beloved Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami (The Nakano Thrift Shop) tells the story of an enigmatic man through the voices of ten remarkable women who have loved him.  

“If you like Haruki Murakami and Yoko Ogawa, it’s a safe bet that you’ll love The Ten Loves of Nishino.”—DozoDomo (France)

Each woman has succumbed, even if only for an hour, to that seductive, imprudent, and furtively feline man who drifted so naturally into their lives. Still clinging to the vivid memory of his warm breath and his indecipherable sentences, ten women tell their stories as they attempt to recreate the image of the unfathomable Nishino.
 
Like a modern Decameron, this humorous, sensual, and touching novel by one of Japan’s best-selling and most beloved writers is a powerful and embracing portrait of the human comedy in ten voices. Driven by desires that are at once unique and common, the women in this book are modern, familiar to us, and still mysterious. A little like Nishino himself.  

Hiromi Kawakami
Hiromi Kawakami is one of Japan’s most acclaimed and successful authors. Winner of numerous prizes for her fiction, including the Akutagawa, Ito Sei, Women Writers (Joryu Bungako Sho), and Izumi Kyoka prizes, she is the author of The Nakano Thrift Shop, a Wall Street Journal Best New Fiction pick, Strange Weather in Tokyo, Manazuru, many many others. Her fiction has appeared in English in The Paris Review and Granta. She lives in Japan.

• Jan 28 2020
  Finalist for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize
  — PEN America
• Aug 9 2019
  “agile, inventive fiction”
  — Booklist
• Jun 17 2019
  “...vividly rendered individuals...”
  — Kirkus Reviews
• Jun 14 2019
  Fiction: Tin-Eared Bureaucrats and Frayed Connections
  — Wall Street Journal
• May 25 2019
  “...a neat little semi-ronde of a novel...”
  — Complete Review
• May 8 2019
  HIROMI KAWAKAMI’S NEW NOVEL CHALLENGES STEREOTYPES ABOUT JAPANESE WOMEN
  — Quartz