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Hiromi Kawakami (b. 1958, Tokyo) is one of the most popular and respected writers of fiction in Japan, and she is also known as a literary critic and a provocative essayist. Her first novel, Kamisama (God), was published in 1994. In 1996 she was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for Hebi wo fumu (Tread on a snake) and subsequently won the It? Sei Literature Prize, the Woman Writer's Prize, the Tanizaki Prize. In 2007 she was honored by the Ministry of Education for her novel Manazuru, which was subsequently published in Michael Emmerich's translation (Counterpoint, 2010), and her novel The Briefcase, translated by Allison Markin Powell, is forthcoming from Counterpoint in February 2012. (Adapted from Wikipedia)