The awards ceremony was hosted by Shueisha, a major Japanese publishing house that recruited Kawakami as a judge, confirming her as an arbiter of taste. “You can see where that sensitivity arises from in her work,” the translator David Boyd told me. More than two decades later, the skills she honed in the boozy, neon-lit back alleys of Osaka - the ability to observe and to listen with acute curiosity - are still apparent in her best-selling novels. “I’m a graduate of hostess university,” she said, recalling her years spent working at a bar where she kept men company as they drank. Kawakami, who is 46, greeted them each with a degree of warmth that made it hard to tell which were strangers and which were her friends. Each time she raised the drink to her lips, another writer, editor or publicist came along to distract her from it. On the last Friday in November, in the afterglow of a literary awards ceremony, the novelist Mieko Kawakami held court in a banquet hall at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, wearing a tweed Gucci dress, clutching an Hermès Birkin handbag and sipping a glass of domestic beer she would never quite finish. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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