IN-PERSON | Transnational Literature Series – Mieko Kawakami with Anna Zielinska-Elliott

This event will take place in person. Click the button above to register so you can be alerted to important details about the program, including safety requirements, cancellations, and book signing updates. Masks are required at this event. 

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith and The Japan Society of Boston for an in-person event with internationally best-selling novelist Mieko Kawakami to discuss and celebrate the release of her new book All the Lovers in the Night. She will be in conversation with translator and scholar Anna Zielinska-Elliott.

Bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami invites readers back into her immediately recognizable fictional world with this new, extraordinary novel—brilliantly translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd—and demonstrates yet again why she is one of today’s most uncategorizable, insightful, and talented novelists.

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyuko stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.

As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface, and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh and cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it.

Mieko Kawakami is the author of the internationally best-selling novel  Breasts and Eggs, a  New York Times  Notable Book of the Year and one of  TIME’s Best 10 Books of 2020; and the highly acclaimed  Heaven, her second novel to be translated and published in English, which  Oprah Daily described as written “with jagged, visceral beauty.” Born in Osaka, Japan, Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006, and in 2007 published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World. Known for their poetic qualities, their insights into the female body, and their preoccupation with ethics and modern society, her books have been translated into over twenty languages. Kawakami’s literary awards include the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. She lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Sam Bett has translated fiction by Yoko Ogawa, Yukio Mishima, and NisiOisin. He also co-hosts Us&Them, a Brooklyn-based reading series showcasing the work of writers who translate. David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated novels and stories by Hiroko Oyamada, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. Sam Bett and David Boyd are the translators of Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night,Heaven, and Breasts and Eggs.

Moderator Anna Zielinska-Elliott is a translator of modern Japanese literature into Polish. Best known for her translations of Haruki Murakami, she has also translated Mishima Yukio, Yoshimoto Banana, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Mizumura Minae. She is the author of a Polish-language monograph on gender in Murakami, a literary guidebook to Murakami’s Tokyo, and several articles on European translation practices relating to contemporary Japanese fiction. Zielinska-Elliott teaches Japanese language, literature, and translation studies at Boston University and is Director of the MFA Program in Literary Translation.

About our event partner

The Japan Society of Boston, Inc, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to promote cultural and economic ties and active interchange between Japanese and Americans for mutual understanding, benefit, and enjoyment. They serve as a programming nexus for a network of individuals, institutions, and businesses that are linked together by a strong interest in Japan and a shared recognition of the importance of the U.S.-Japan relationship.