Mitsuyo Kakuta


Mitsuyo Kakuta is a Japanese author born in Yokohama. She is currently engaged in translating the 11th-century work The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese.

Prized works

She made her debut while still a student at Waseda University's Faculty of Literature, with Kōfuku na yūgi, and received the Kaien Prize for New Writers in 1990. After publishing two well-received novels in 2002, Ekonomikaru paresu and Kūchū teien, she went on to win the Noma Literary New Face Prize, and the Naoki Prize for Woman on the Other Shore in 2004.
The Eighth Day, translated into English in 2010, received the 2007 Chūō Kōron Literary Prize and has been made into a television drama series and a film. Both her 2012 books – her novel Kami no tsuki and her volume of short stories, Kanata no ko – were prizewinners. Altogether she has written over 80 works of fiction.

Current events

Mitsuyo Kakuta is married to the fellow writer Takami Itō. She stated in an interview in October 2015 that she is translating the 11th-century classic The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese and this was likely to take her three years, the first two volumes of this adaptation have now been published. In the same interview she mentioned Shuichi Yoshida, Yōko Ogawa and Kaori Ekuni as contemporary Japanese writers whom she could recommend. She is a member of Red Circle Authors, a curated group of contemporary Japanese authors.