Tomoka Shibasaki

Tomoka Shibasaki is a Japanese novelist born in 1973 in Osaka. She is one of the most important and internationally recognized Japanese writers of her generation, known for fiction that explores urban life, loneliness, and the texture of everyday experience with quiet, observational precision. Her work has been widely translated internationally. Shibasaki is the author of numerous novels and short story collections. Spring Garden (Haru no niwa), which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2014, is a slim, luminous novel set in a Tokyo apartment building where a divorced man becomes obsessed with a neighbor's obsession with a nearby house featured in a 1970s photo book. The novel is a meditation on memory, the past embedded in urban space, and the slow intimacies that form between isolated people. Spring Garden was translated into English by Meredith McKinney and published to wide international acclaim. Shibasaki has continued to write acclaimed fiction since, including Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms and All the Lovers in the Night. Shibasaki is one of the leading Japanese novelists working today, known for her gentle, precise style and her capacity to find profound significance in small, everyday observations.