Fabula’s literary evening – Mieko Kawakami: Summer stories

The virtual Q&A between Mieko Kawakami and Nagisa Moritoki Škof will take place on Thursday, 14 April, at the CD Club. The event will be accompanied by a butoh performance featuring Darinka Pillari. Slovenian subtitles. 



Summer Stories, the latest novel by Japanese author of the middle generation Japanese writer of younger in-between population, fits into that sparsely populated and thus even more appreciated population of literary works that are adored by Western and Eastern critics and readers alike. It paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. The characters and their stories show us the images of motherhood, birth, integrity of the female body, freedom, and difficult decisions many women must face. The novel showing incredible emotional relentlessness and depth was first published in 2008. It is divided into two sections, with the events of part happening 10 years later, giving time for tectonic movements in the lives of our main protagonists and making the novel even more powerfully insightful.

The novel was translated by Nina Habjan Villarreal and Domen Kavčič.

Mieko Kawakami (1976) made her literary debut as a poet in 2006,a year later published two short stories and for the second, entitled Breasts and Eggs, received the award for young perspective authors. Her most successful work to date, the novel Summer Stories, which came out in 2019 and brought her worldwide fame, was conceived as an expanded and revised version of her second short story collection. Her works are known for their experimental and poetic qualities, their insights into the female body, and their preoccupation with ethics and modern society. Mieko Kawakami has received several prestigious Japanese literary awards (Akutagawa, Tanizaki and Murasaki Shikibu awards) for her work, and the novel Summer Stories was also ranked among the top ten literary highlights in 2020 by Time magazine. The famous Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has likened her as “his favourite new novelist” and “a tree that is always ceaselessly growing and evolving”.