Many of the most popular Japanese titles in translation belong to the healing fiction genre: cozy, comforting stories that often feature some combination of cats, cafés, and books, such as Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series or The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa. Many of these books happen to be written by men.
But other authors have gone in a different direction, creating challenging fiction that critiques society from a uniquely female Japanese point of view. Four of them discuss the phenomenon with PW.
Sister, Sister
“If you write realistic novels with female characters in Japan, you’re automatically labeled as a feminist,” Akira Otani says. “I don’t write deliberately as a feminist. I’m a woman, so I’m a circumstantial feminist.”
Otani’s first novel to be translated into English, The Night of Baba Yaga (translated by Sam Bett), won the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger for crime fiction in translation in 2025. It tells the story of a yakuza princess and her female bodyguard. Upon its 2020 publication in Japan, the title gained notice for its depictions of LGBTQ+ people and examination of sisterhood, a concept that’s written phonetically in Japanese because no close equivalent exists in kanji.
The author, who began her career as a video game writer, says she enjoys playing around with tropes and plot structures borrowed from popular entertainment. The Night of Baba Yaga is violent, and press materials compared it to Kill Bill and Thelma and Louise. Still, Otani notes, her work is grounded in truth. “Writing about Japanese female characters who don’t deal with misogyny? That would be a fantasy novel.”
Asako Yuzuki, author of Butter (translated by Polly Barton), feels a literary kinship with Otani. “She likes manga and animation and I like cooking shows and expressing female solidarity—and we both put these themes into our writing,” Yuzuki says. Her English-language debut Butter, inspired by a true crime story, is a tale of mutual fascination between a journalist and a serial killer who seduces her victims through cooking. “In Japan, Butter was seen as a story of a catfight between women or else as food porn,” she notes. “I assumed that this reception was due to my lack of writing technique, but in the West, they saw the feminism and the irony.”
Butter was named the 2024 Waterstones Book of the Year, and has enjoyed strong and steady sales in the U.S. as well. Her next English-language release, Hooked (translated by Barton), which Ecco is publishing in March, again explores the dark side of female relationships, focusing on the obsessive, odd-couple relationship between a buttoned-up executive and a lifestyle blogger.
Yuzuki believes that books about the struggle of insecure work, including Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (translated by Barton), opened doors to Western readers. “My generation, born in the 1970s and 1980s, is called the ‘employment ice age’ generation,” she says. “They graduated in the 1990s straight into the post-bubble stagnation, and continue to struggle with un- and underemployment. This is something younger Western readers can relate to, and we’ve been writing about it for years.”
Reality Bites
The problems are particularly acute for women, novelist Natsuo Kirino notes: Japan remains ranks 118th on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, and the #MeToo movement was met with significant backlash and failed to tackle issues of poverty and discrimination. “Dissatisfaction with this reality is what drives female novelists, who are working from a tradition of women writing haiku and tanka poetry to express their innermost feelings,” she explains. “Meanwhile, male writers are often not aware of women’s reality because they are in a more advantageous place.”
Kirino is known for using crime as a vehicle for sociological observation, and she says she writes in response to a media landscape that sensationalizes and sexualizes the women involved. “I’m frustrated with how women are depicted by men—in a Madonna-whore binary, without any in-between,” she says. “I always want to find a problem in society and portray it from the female perspective.”
The plot of her most recent book, 2025’s Swallows (translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda), involves an office temp whose desperate quest for financial security leads her into a problematic surrogate pregnancy. Kirino made her English language debut with 2003’s Out (translated by Stephen B. Snyder), about four women who work the night shift in a Tokyo factory; one of the workers strangles her abusive husband and her coworkers help her cover up the crime.
When the novel pubbed in Japan in 1997, it went on to win the Mystery Writers of Japan’s Grand Prix for crime fiction. Even so, Kirino notes, many male reviewers rejected the premise, and she was also advised against depicting female characters having sex, so that they could remain “pure” and be objects of lust for male readers. “Nowadays things have changed,” she says. “Editors and readers prefer evil women.”
Boom or Bust
Akutagawa Prize winner Mieko Kawakami has thoughts on what readers want—specifically on what draws international readers to Japanese literature. “They’re looking for a healing element, a safe haven: cats, cafés, and bookshops; women characters who won’t look you right in the eye with an accusatory stare,” she says. “They’re looking for the Japan where everyong is speaking quietly and is well-mannered, where everything is small and cute.”
Kawakami has had commercial and critical success with novels including Breasts and Eggs, and the International Booker–shortlisted Heaven, a story of middle school trauma and bullying (both translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd). Sisters in Yellow (translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio), due out in March from Knopf, is “a remarkable noir-tinged tale of female desperation,” according to PW’s starred review.
Nonetheless, she takes a dim view of the future of Japanese literature abroad. “Until 2020, educated people in foreign countries thought it was generous of them to read Asian fiction,” she says. “Now the boom is here and the U.S. publishers realize that literature in translation can sell, but I’m not sure if it’s a good situation for the writers.”
She cites the sudden popularity several years ago of Korean women writers, which led to a surge in new translations. “Publishers who had no knowledge about Korea jumped on the bandwagon, so the quality of translations varied,” Kawakami says. “I don’t think Japanese literature in translation can avoid that destiny. It’s difficult to break through and the U.S. market in particular is severe—if the first book doesn’t perform, the author will be dropped.”
Kawakami offers this advice to publishers: “Editors gambling on another dozen feminine and quirky titles will lead to disaster. For Japanese literature to continue to attract readers beyond this current boom, the editors have to look beyond the tyranny of cute and cozy.”
