Join us for a conversation between Hiromi Kawakami, in town from Tokyo for only two days, and the Pittsburgh-based author Adam Ehrlich Sachs.

HIROMI KAWAKAMI is one of Japan’s most popular novelists. Many of her books have been published in English, including Manazuru, The Nakano Thrift Shop, Parade, Record of a Night Too Brief, Strange Weather in Tokyo (shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2013), and The Ten Loves of Nishino. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature. People from My Neighborhood, translated by Ted Goossen, was published in 2021. Dragon Palace, also translated by Ted Goossen, was published under the MONKEY imprint in 2023. Her work appears in every issue of MONKEY New Writing from Japan.

ADAM EHRLICH SACHS is the author of three books: Gretel and the Great War, The Organs of Sense, and Inherited Disorders. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, and Harper’s, and he was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Aoko Matsuda translated five of his stories from Inherited Disorders for the Japanese MONKEY (Spring 2018); for the same issue, she wrote a story in response to his work, which was translated into English by Polly Barton as “A Father and His Back” and published in MONKEY New Writing from Japan (2022).