Hiromi Kawakami

Hiromi Kawakami is a Japanese writer known for her fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature. Her work has been adapted for film, and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. The Ten Loves of Nishino will be published by Europa Editions on June 4, 2019.

In the Grass

Fiction by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell June 3, 2019

Those third and fourth nights, I cried and wailed. On the morning of the fifth day, my eyes were so swollen my father took one look at me and said, “Shiori, your face—it looks like the goldfish put a curse on you.”