Natsuko Imamura

Natsuko Imamura is a Japanese novelist born in 1980 in Hiroshima. She is one of the most important writers of her generation in Japan, known for fiction that engages with the experiences of women on the margins of Japanese society with compassion, psychological depth, and formal inventiveness. Imamura published her debut novel in 2012 and has gone on to produce a substantial body of work. The Woman in the Purple Skirt (Murasaki no Sukato no Onna), which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2019, is a formally inventive psychological novel narrated by an unnamed woman who becomes obsessively fixated on a neighbor known only as 'the woman in the purple skirt.' The novel is a disturbing and darkly comic study of desire, obsession, and the invisible loneliness of urban life. The novel was translated into English by Lucy North and published to wide international acclaim, introducing Imamura to a global readership. It was praised for its formal originality — the narrator's unreliability and obsessiveness create an unsettling reading experience — and its portrait of working-class female experience in contemporary Japan. Imamura continues to be one of the most significant and internationally recognized voices in contemporary Japanese fiction.