Nipponia Nippon: Japanese Novellas

Kazushige Abe is one of Japan's pre-eminent contemporary writers. A graduate of the Japanese Film School in Tokyo, he worked as an assistant director before turning his hand to writing. Since winning the Gunzo New Writers' Prize for his first novel, American Night, he has been awarded several of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, including the Sei Ito Award, the Mainichi Culture Award, the Akutagawa Prize and the Tanizaki Prize. Kerim Yasar teaches modern Japanese literature at the University of Southern California. He is active as a translator in a variety of genres and media, from contemporary novels to pre-modern poetry, and has translated more than a hundred feature films in the Criterion Collection library.