Hiromi Kawakami writes about loneliness with a light touch and a streak of the uncanny. In her most famous novel, a woman in her late thirties drinks sake with her retired schoolteacher and slowly falls in love. In others, a secondhand shop’s staff drift through small romances, ten women remember the same elusive man, or humanity dwindles into a strange far future where children are grown in factories. She is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary writers, she has won most of the country’s major prizes, and English readers now have a substantial shelf of her books thanks to a small group of devoted translators.
This guide walks through the Hiromi Kawakami books available in English, which ones suit which readers, and where to begin. I haven’t read Kawakami, so the notes below draw on reviews, her interviews, and the publishing record.
Where to Start
Strange Weather in Tokyo is the obvious first book: short, gentle, funny, and her best-known novel in English. If you want something with a bit more ensemble warmth, The Nakano Thrift Shop is a good alternative. Readers who prefer stranger, more speculative fiction should go straight to Under the Eye of the Big Bird.
From Science Fiction to the Akutagawa Prize
Kawakami was born in Tokyo on 1 April 1958 and grew up in Takaido, in the Suginami district, graduating from Ochanomizu University in 1980. That same year she made her first appearance in print, not as Kawakami but as Yamada Hiromi, publishing a story called Diptera in the science-fiction magazine NW-SF, which she had also helped to edit. Then she stopped.
She reinvented herself more than a decade later. The story God appeared in 1994, and in 1996 she won the Akutagawa Prize for A Snake Stepped On, collected in English in Record of a Night Too Brief. The Tanizaki Prize followed in 2001 for Strange Weather in Tokyo, with the Ito Sei Literature Prize and the Women Writers’ Prize already hers for Drowning, and the ministry’s Art Encouragement Prize came in 2007 for Manazuru. The list has kept growing since: the Yomiuri Prize in 2015, and the Izumi Kyoka Prize in 2016 for Under the Eye of the Big Bird.
She is also a working literary critic and essayist, and has contributed fiction to Granta in both the UK and Japan, which is part of how her name traveled before the novels did.
Strange Weather in Tokyo
2001 · translated by Allison Markin Powell
Tsukiko, a single office worker in her late thirties, runs into her former high school Japanese teacher, whom she calls only Sensei, at a neighborhood bar. They start meeting to drink and eat together, without arranging it, and over the passing seasons, from cherry blossoms to autumn mushroom hunting, their companionship turns hesitantly into love. The gap between them is more than thirty years, and the novel treats that as a fact rather than a scandal.
It won the Tanizaki Prize, and its English translation made the shortlists for both the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. One publishing detail explains a lot of confusion: it first appeared in English in 2012 as The Briefcase, a closer rendering of the Japanese title, Sensei no kaban, and was republished under its current name in 2017, so both titles circulate secondhand. There is also a Japanese manga adaptation, drawn by Jiro Taniguchi.
Parade
2002 · translated by Allison Markin Powell
A short companion piece to Strange Weather in Tokyo. On a hot summer afternoon, Sensei asks Tsukiko to tell him a story from her childhood, and she describes the two small tengu, long-nosed goblins out of Japanese folklore, who followed her around for a year when she was a girl, visible to nobody else.
It’s a slim, folkloric side door into the same world, and it is best read after the novel, partly because it assumes you already care about these two people and partly because the pleasure is hearing them talk without any plot to get through.
The Nakano Thrift Shop
2005 · translated by Allison Markin Powell
A young woman named Hitomi works at a secondhand shop in a western Tokyo suburb, run by the eccentric, womanizing Mr. Nakano, along with his artist sister Masayo and a shy young coworker named Takeo. The novel moves through the small dramas of the shop, the objects that come through it, the customers who bring them, and the tentative, mostly wordless romance between Hitomi and Takeo.
It’s the most ensemble-driven of her books in English and the one most interested in work: what a shop is, who ends up in one, and how people manage intimacy while handling other people’s discarded belongings. A good pick for readers who enjoy quiet, character-led fiction.
The Ten Loves of Nishino
2003 · translated by Allison Markin Powell
Ten women, at different points in his life, describe their relationships with the same man, Yukihiko Nishino, a charming, evasive figure who seems unable to truly love any of them and whom none of them can quite dismiss. The novel builds a portrait of him entirely from the outside, through the people he passed through, and he never gets a chapter of his own.
Powell’s translation won the PEN America Translation Prize in 2020. It is the most formally elegant of her books, and the one that rewards reading straight through rather than dipping: the tenth account lands differently once you have the other nine.
Manazuru
2006 · translated by Michael Emmerich
Years after her husband disappeared without explanation, a woman named Kei keeps returning to the seaside town of Manazuru, accompanied by a presence she can see and others cannot, while she manages her teenage daughter and her own mother at home. The novel moves between the coast and Tokyo, and between the living and whatever it is that follows her.
It’s darker and more dreamlike than her better-known novels, an atmospheric study of grief and of a marriage that ended without an ending. Emmerich’s translation won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize, and this is the book to read if you want the Kawakami who unsettles rather than warms.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
2016 · translated by Asa Yoneda
In a distant future, humanity has dwindled to small tribes scattered across the planet, watched over by figures called the Mothers. Some children are manufactured in factories from the cells of rabbits and dolphins. Some live on water and light, like plants. The novel proceeds through linked stories across enormous stretches of time, and the question underneath all of them is whether connection, love and reproduction can survive the conditions people are surviving in.
Kawakami has said what set it off: the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March 2011. It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025, and it is the fullest expression of the speculative instinct that runs back to that science-fiction story she published in 1980.
The Third Love
translated by Ted Goossen
Her most recent novel in English follows a woman whose dreams carry her into other lives in other periods of Japanese history, including the Edo pleasure quarters, while her waking marriage disappoints her in the present. The structure lets Kawakami write historical fiction and contemporary fiction in the same book without either one being a frame for the other.
It’s the longest of her novels in English and the most divisive: readers who want the compression of Strange Weather in Tokyo find it loose, and readers who came for her strangeness find it the boldest thing she has done.
Short Fiction
Several collections show her range in shorter forms. Record of a Night Too Brief, translated by Lucy North, gathers three early pieces including the Akutagawa Prize winner, in which a woman swallows a night, a snake becomes a mother, and a sister shrinks. Dragon Palace, translated by Ted Goossen, collects stories that blend Japanese myth with everyday life, most of them featuring metamorphosis of some kind. People From My Neighborhood, also translated by Goossen, is a sequence of very short, linked tales about a strange corner of Japan where a child lives under a blanket and the local school has a peculiar relationship with time.
Start with People From My Neighborhood if you want the most approachable of the three, and Record of a Night Too Brief if you want to see what the Akutagawa committee rewarded.
The Full English List at a Glance
Novels: Strange Weather in Tokyo (first published as The Briefcase) · Parade · The Ten Loves of Nishino · The Nakano Thrift Shop · Manazuru · Under the Eye of the Big Bird · The Third Love
Short fiction: Record of a Night Too Brief · Dragon Palace · People From My Neighborhood
Suggested order: Strange Weather in Tokyo, Parade, The Nakano Thrift Shop, then Manazuru or Under the Eye of the Big Bird depending on which Kawakami you want.
Where to Go Next
Readers who loved the quiet companionship of Strange Weather in Tokyo will find more gentle Japanese fiction on the Japanese healing fiction list. For a contemporary with a similar mix of tenderness and strangeness, see the Yoko Ogawa guide, and for another writer who shares a surname but not a style, the Mieko Kawakami guide. The speculative side of her work sits close to Yoko Tawada’s, covered in the Yoko Tawada guide.
