A Japanese-American raised in California, 24-year old Katie Kitamura returns to Japan to discover the country she left behind. Travelling across this foreign landscape, she visits middle-class gambling halls, fight stadiums and giant shopping meccas, luxury care homes and cramped apartments housing four generations under a single roof. And she wonders in which version of modern Japan she might have belonged. Defined by its adventurous youth culture, but with the fastest-ageing population in the world, renowned for its strict social code, but producing the black-comedy violence of Battle Royale films, the Japan she discovers is an often contradictory land of Godzilla toys and war memorials, of futuristic manga characters and brightly coloured vending machines.
Author
Katie Kitamura is the author of Gone to the Forest (2012) and The Longshot (2009), both finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. Gone to the Forest was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, and New Yorker online. The recipient of a Lannan Foundation fellowship, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, BOMB, and is a regular contributor to Frieze. Her third novel, A Separation, will be published in 2017.
