About Minae Mizumura

Minae Mizumura is an internationally renowned novelist and critic based in Tokyo. She has published four books of fiction, three books of nonfiction, and coauthored a compilation of epistolary essays. Her writing in English has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, HuffPost, and The New York Review of Books.

She is acclaimed for her audacious experimentation and skillful storytelling. Her work pays homage to the Japanese literary tradition while breaking new ground. Four of her books, all of which won major awards including the Yomiuri Literature Award, have been translated into English by Juliet Winters Carpenter in close collaboration with the author: A True Novel (2013), The Fall of Language in the Age of English (translated with Mari Yoshihara, 2014), Inheritance from Mother (2017), and An I-Novel (2021).

Born in 1951, Mizumura moved with her family from Tokyo to Long Island, New York when she was twelve. Surrounded by a new and strange language, she felt alienated and took solace in reading and rereading novels from a 1926, sixty-three volume collection of modern Japanese literature pictured above. After studying fine art in Boston and then living briefly in Paris, she went on to study French literature at Yale College and Yale Graduate School.

While Mizumura was a graduate student, Yale French Studies invited her to publish "Renunciation," a critical essay on the work of her late faculty advisor, the renowned literary critic Paul de Man (1919-1983). The essay brought out a “turn” in de Man’s career, noting the frequent appearance of the word "renunciation" in his work and its sudden disappearance, and thereby showing that he had renounced the possibility of renunciation itself. Upon finishing her M.Phil. program, she returned to Japan to devote herself to writing in her native language.

Her debut novel, Zoku meian (Light and Dark continued, 1990) boldly finished the last, uncompleted work of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), considered modern Japan’s greatest novelist. Recreating his idiosyncratic and now somewhat archaic writing style, it brought closure to long standing critical speculations on how the novel would have ended. By the final scene, the protagonist’s vantage point has been deftly replaced with that of his wife. Zoku meian, as yet untranslated, established Mizumura’s status as a major new writer overnight.

Her fictional autobiography Shishōsetsu from left to right (1995; translated as An I-Novel, 2021) portrays the daughter of expatriates, a girl who comes of age in the United States while immersed in Japanese literature. Named for a cherished genre in Japan, the book uses a bilingual text and horizontal print to break away from the traditional format and questions what it means to write in the Japanese language today.

Honkaku shōsetsu (2002; translated as A True Novel, 2014) takes up where An I-Novel leaves off and evolves into a retelling of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, setting the world classic against the backdrop of postwar Japan, while illuminating how literature travels from one language to another. By detailing how the half-Chinese Heathcliff amassed his fortune to realize the American dream, it delivers the original novel’s missing link. It also transforms the problematic maid-narrator into a full-fledged character while keeping intact the haunting story of doomed love.

Haha no isan: Shinbun shōsetsu (2012; translated as Inheritance from Mother, 2017), originally serialized in Japan’s largest newspaper, centers around a middle-aged French instructor overwhelmed by the demands of her dying mother and the betrayals of her philandering husband. It also reflects on the once-thriving tradition of serial novels and how they helped propagate the Western notion of romantic love across Japan.

Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo no seiki no naka de (2008; translated as The Fall of Language in the Age of English, 2015) traces the rise and demise of national languages and literatures, focusing on the Japanese example. The bestseller examines the history of the written word and shows how the world dominance of the English language was inevitable and yet may prove fatal to some literary traditions. Japanese, the first non-Indo-European language to have established a modern nation-state, may eventually degenerate into a trivial and provincial language, the book warns.

Essays and works of criticism by Mizumura have been compiled in two volumes, as yet untranslated, whose titles may be rendered in English as To read in the Japanese language and To write in the Japanese language (2009).

Mizumura has taught modern Japanese literature at Princeton, the University of Michigan, and Stanford. A former resident novelist of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, she is now a member of its Advisory Committee.

Today, Mizumura is serializing what she considers to be her last translatable novel Taishi to sono tsuma (An ambassador and his wife), that is supposedly written in Japanese by a white American man, in the literary journal Shinchō. She is also writing a tribute to a master of traditional Japanese dance and a memoir about her participation in a wide range of art disciplines commonly practiced in Japan.

Japanese Literary Awards

• 1991—Minister of Education Award for New Artists, Zoku meian (Light and dark continued).

• 1996—Noma New Author Award, An I-Novel.

• 2003—Yomiuri Prize for Literature, A True Novel.

• 2009—Kobayashi Hideo Award, The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

• 2012—Osaragi Jiro Award, Inheritance from Mother.

Education

• 1963—Keisen Junior High School for Girls, Tokyo.

• 1969—Great Neck North Junior and Senior High Schools, Great Neck, New York.

• 1971—School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

• 1972—Les Cours de civilisation française de La Sorbonne, Paris.

• 1976—B.A., French Major, Yale College. summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Honors in French.

• 1982—M.A., French Department, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Yale University. Marguerite A. Peyre Prize.

• 1984—M.Ph., French Department, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Yale University.

Positions

• 1984-1985—Fellow, Japan Foundation.

• 1987-1991—Lecturer (tenure track), Princeton University.

• 1991—Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Michigan.

• 1998—Visiting Professor, Stanford University.

• 2003—Resident novelist, International Writing Program, University of Iowa.

• 2004-present—Advisor, International Writing Program, University of Iowa.

• 2005—Participating novelist, PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature.

• 2007—Keynote Lecturer, Association for Japanese Literary Studies, Princeton University.

• 2007—Edwin McClellan Visiting Fellow in Japanese Studies Lecturer, Yale University.

• 2007—Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture Lecturer, Columbia University.

• 2009—Featured novelist, Book Festival and Symposium, Aix-en-Provence, France.

• 2011—Featured novelist, Festival Internacional de Literatura de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

• 2013—Resident novelist, Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies, Free University of Berlin.

• 2014—Guest novelist, Tokyo International Literary Festival, Tokyo, Japan.

• 2014—Guest novelist, Aspen Institute Japan, Nara, Japan.

• 2014—Featured novelist, Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, Bali, Indonesia.

• 2015—Guest lecturer, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

• 2016—Featured novelist, Bradford Literature Festival, Bradford, United Kingdom.

• 2017—Sen Lecturer, Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, Columbia University.

• 2021—George Town Literary Festival, George Town, Malaysia.

Honors

2003—Selected, Japanese Literature Publishing Project, Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Government of Japan, A True Novel. 

2013—Selected, Editors’ Choice, “Recent books of particular interest,” New York Times, A True Novel.

2014—Selected, “Illuminating Love in Japan,” Worth Sharing, vol. 3, Japan Foundation, Inheritance from Mother.

2014—Awarded, Lewis Galantière Award, American Translators Association, A True Novel.

2014—Selected, 2014 Best Translated Book Awards: Fiction Finalists, Three Percent, A True Novel.

2014—Selected, Runner-up, Best Translated Book Award, A True Novel. 

2014—Awarded, Grand Prize for Fiction, Next Generation Indie Book Awards, A True Novel.

2014-2015—Awarded, Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prizes for the Translation of Japanese Literature, The Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University, A True Novel.

2015—Selected, “Paperback Row,” New York Times, for A True Novel.

2015—Selected, “World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2015,” The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

2015—Selected, “10 Best Books by Academic Publishers of 2015,” Flavorwire, The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

2015—Selected, “22 Essential Women Writers to Read in Translation,” Flavorwire, A True Novel and The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

2015—Selected, “10 Must-Read Academic Books for 2015,” Flavorwire, The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

2017—Selected, Editor’s Choice, “8 New Books We Recommend This Week, Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times,” Inheritance from Mother.

2017—Selected, “O's Top 20 Books to Read This Summer, 2017,” The Oprah's Book Club, Inheritance from Mother.

2017—Selected, “World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2017,” Inheritance from Mother.

2017—Selected, “Our Summer Reading List, Summer 2017,” Literary Affairs, Inheritance from Mother.

2017—Selected, “Mother's Day, Books Mom Will Love 2017,” Bookreporter, Inheritance from Mother.

2017—Selected, “What to Read Now: Summer Reading List 2017,” World Literature Today, Inheritance from Mother.

2017-2018—Awarded, Support Program for Translation and Publication on Japan, Japan Foundation, Inheritance from Mother.

2019-20—Awarded, William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation, The University of Chicago, An I-Novel.