Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. Since the publication of God in 1994, she has written numerous novels and collections of short stories, including Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Nakano Thrift Shop. Her most recent novel, Running Water, was published in Japan in 2014 and won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Hiromi Kawakami has previously been awarded the Akutagawa Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages.

Baffling, unsettling and haunting, these stories have a dreamlike atmosphere The Lady A truly fantastical story which requires thorough reading, yet rewards with rich imagery that will challenge anyone's powers of imagination The Japan Society At once funny and humane, the author's estranging fiction is bewitching. If Japan were in need of a Lewis Carroll, look no further South China Morning Post Slippery and unfamiliar places where logic is internal and surreal... gives the reader the strange sense of being led through a collection of dreams Asymptote