Inheritance from Mother

Minae Mizumura is one of the most important writers in Japan today. Born in Tokyo, she moved with her family to Long Island, New York, when she was twelve. She studied French literature at Yale College and Yale Graduate School. Her other novels include the Yomiuri Prize-winning A True Novel, Zoku meian (Light and Dark Continued),a sequel to the unfinished classic Light andDark by Soseki Natsume, and Shishosetsufrom left to right (An I-Novel from Left to Right), an autobiographical work. Her most recent book in English, The Fall of Language in the Age of English, was published in 2015 by Columbia University Press. She lives in Tokyo.

Juliet Winters Carpenter studied Japanese language and literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies inTokyo. Carpenter's translation of Kobo Abe's novel Secret Rendezvous won the 1980 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Litera-ture, and her translation of Minae Mizumura's A True Novel won the same prize for 2015-2016, making her the only person to have won this prestigious award twice.