Hitomi Kanehara, the Akutagawa prodigy turning her pen on the publishing world that made her

In mid-November, in the city of Uji south of Kyoto, Hitomi Kanehara will collect the Murasaki Shikibu Literary Prize, the award the city created for writing by women and named after the author of The Tale of Genji. The book being honoured is YABUNONAKA, a long novel about sexual exploitation inside Japan’s literary publishing world and the accusation that blows it open, told by eight narrators, four men and four women. It had already taken the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award last year. Announcing the prize in September, the jury singled out its “powerful brushwork” and “outstanding structure”. Kanehara said she hoped the book could give readers a small foothold for thinking through questions that have no answers while the times change around them like a storm.

It is a long way from where she started. At twenty, Kanehara shared the Akutagawa Prize with Risa Wataya, then nineteen, for her first novel, Snakes and Earrings. At the time they were the two youngest winners in the history of Japan’s most watched literary award. The book went on to sell more than a million copies in Japan.

Snakes and Earrings follows Lui, a young woman in Tokyo who falls in with a punk boyfriend whose tongue is split like a snake’s and a tattoo artist with sadistic tastes. She splits her own tongue, gets a dragon-and-kirin tattoo and drinks herself towards nothing. Kanehara wrote it in flat, quick sentences that refuse to explain or judge, and that refusal is what unsettled readers. Announced in January 2004, the Akutagawa came a few months after the book had won the Subaru Literary Prize in 2003, and the novelist Ryu Murakami wrote the commentary for its paperback edition. David James Karashima’s English translation appeared in 2005, and Yukio Ninagawa filmed it in 2008 with Yuriko Yoshitaka as Lui.

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Kanehara was born in Tokyo on 8 August 1983. Her father, Mizuhito Kanehara, is a professor at Hosei University and a prolific translator of children’s and young adult fiction. She stopped going to school in fourth grade. At 12 she spent a year in San Francisco while her father studied there, reading the Japanese novels he picked out for her, Ryu Murakami and Eimi Yamada among them, and began to write. At 14 she was sitting in on her father’s university seminar, where she discovered Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. She has spoken openly about the self-harm of her teenage years, and the body in pain, pierced, starved or cut, runs through her early books, from AMEBIC (2005) to Autofiction (2006), which tells a young novelist’s love life backwards, from a jealous wife of 22 to a girl of 15. Karashima translated it into English in 2007.

Then her subject shifted. Married to her editor at the publisher Shueisha, she had her first daughter in 2007, and the novels began to look at what motherhood does to a woman’s sense of herself. TRIP TRAP (2009) won the Oda Sakunosuke Prize. Mothers (2011), about three young mothers stretched to breaking point, won the Bunkamura Deux Magots Literary Prize in 2012. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011, worried about radiation, she left Tokyo for Okayama, where her second daughter was born, and in 2012 moved the family to Paris. She stayed six years, and her essay collection about that period, a book about the deserts of Paris and the mirages of Tokyo, came out in 2020.

Back in Japan from 2018, she entered the most decorated stretch of her career. Ataraxia (2019), a novel of adultery and quiet marital cruelty, won the Watanabe Junichi Literary Prize. Unsocial Distance (2021), stories about young people who drop out of the rules of the pandemic years, among them a college couple who plan a suicide trip when the concert of their favourite band is cancelled, won the Tanizaki Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in Japanese letters. Meets the World (2022), in which a shy 27-year-old devoted to a manga about grilled meat is taken in by a hostess in Kabukicho, won the Shibata Renzaburo Prize. Daigo Matsui’s film version, starring Hana Sugisaki, opened in October 2025, the first screen adaptation of her work in 17 years. Between them came fishy (2020) and Natural Born Chicken (2024).

YABUNONAKA gathers all of this. Its title echoes the Japanese phrase “yabu no naka”, in the thicket, taken from Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s story of a crime told by witnesses whose accounts never agree, and it now means a truth no one can reach. Kanehara applies it to a former literary magazine editor-in-chief accused of past abuse, and lets eight people caught up in the case, the accused man among them, speak in turn. No narrator owns the story. Having entered the business at 20 through the same literary magazines and prizes she now examines, Kanehara writes from inside the industry.

Since April 2026 she has also had a mainstream television role. TV Tokyo chose her as the main interviewer of Cambria Palace, its long-running business talk show, succeeding Ryu Murakami after 20 years. Announcing the change, she admitted that three other writers had come to mind as better candidates and that she might be “a casting mistake”, before giving in to curiosity. The network pointed out the coincidence that Murakami wrote the commentary for her debut and she wrote the one for his recent novel.

Outside Japan she remains, for most readers, the author of two books translated twenty years ago. That may be changing: stories have appeared in Granta, and the translator Yuki Tejima has published an English excerpt of Unsocial Distance. Her serial novel Additional Life has been running in the magazine Subaru since 2025, in the same magazine that gave her its prize at 20.

Tags: novelists, writers, Risa Wataya, Hitomi Kanehara, Autofiction, Ryu Murakami

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