MIZUMURA MINAE

Mizumura Minae is a novelist and critic based in Tokyo. Mizumura moved with her family to Long Island, New York, when she was 12 and completed her education through graduate school in America and Europe. She subsequently returned to Japan to devote herself to writing Japanese fiction. Her first novel, Zoku Meian (Light and Darkness Continued, 1990), “completed” author Natsume Soseki’s unfinished novel Meian using his same idiosyncratic style. It won the Minister of Education Award for New Artists in 1991. She has since published a pseudo-INovel titled Watakushi shosetsu from left to right (An I-Novel from Left to Right, 1995) that innovated literary typography by printing the text horizontally instead of vertically, and Honkaku shosetsu (A Real Novel, 2002), an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights reset in postwar Japan, which won the Yomiuri Prize in 2003.

See also LITERARY CRITICISM.