Hiromi Kawakami - Strange Weather in Tokyo

Those nights, I open Sensei’s briefcase and peer inside. The blank empty space unfolds, containing nothing within. It holds nothing more than an expanse of desolate absence.

^{Author photograph by Tomohiro Muta}

HIROMI KAWAKAMI is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary novelists. She was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 1996 for A Snake Stepped On (Hebi o fumu). Her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo (Sensei no kaban) was short-listed for both the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and has been translated into thirteen languages. Manazuru won the 2011 Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize.