Hiromi Kawakami is a novelist, essayist, and translator who has published over eighty books in both Japan and the United States. Her fiction includes novels, short stories, and essays on women's issues; she has written numerous short stories about her personal experiences. Her essays include reflections on her time in Kyoto during the 1960s and '70s, where she founded an antiwar movement against nuclear weapons. Her translations include the travel writing of Hishida Shunsai, the work of Henri Michaux, and the writings of Alice Tokoi
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Born in Tokyo in 1933, Kawakami studied literature at Waseda University from 1950 to 1954 before going to Paris to study at the Sorbonne from 1955 to 1957. In the late 1960s she returned to Japan and took up residence in Kyoto, where she taught literature at a university for a number of years. In 1970 she moved to New York City.