This image is the cover for the book Ten Loves of Nishino

Ten Loves of Nishino

The story of an enigmatic man through the voices of ten remarkable women who have loved him at one point in their lives.

Each woman has succumbed, even if only for an hour, to that seductive, imprudent, and furtively feline man who drifted so naturally into their lives. Still clinging to the vivid memory of his warm breath and his indecipherable sentences, ten women tell their stories as they attempt to recreate the image of the unfathomable Nishino.

Like a modern Decameron, this humorous, sensual, and touching novel by one of Japan’s best-selling and most beloved writers is a powerful and embracing portrait of the human comedy in ten voices. Driven by desires that are at once unique and common, the women in this book are modern, familiar to us, and still mysterious. A little like Nishino himself . . .

Winner 2020 Pen Translation Prize

Praise for The Ten Loves of Nishino

“If you like Haruki Murakami and Yoko Ogawa, it’s a safe bet that you’ll love The Ten Loves of Nishino.” —DozoDomo (France)

“Agile, inventive fiction.” —Booklist

“An intriguing portrayal of romantic attachment.” —The New Yorker

“The women in this collection are vibrant, lusty, and clearly the agents of their own love lives . . . . Kawakami's novel treats its feminist themes with a light hand but still slyly lands its points.” —Kirkus Reviews

Hiromi Kawakami, Allison Markin Powell

Hiromi Kawakami is one of Japan's most acclaimed and successful authors. Winner of numerous prizes for her fiction, including the Akutagawa, Ito Sei, Women Writers (Joryu Bungako Sho), and Izumi Kyoka prizes, she is the author of The Nakano Thrift Shop, a Wall Street Journal Best New Fiction pick, Strange Weather in Tokyo, Manazuru, and many many others. Her fiction has appeared in English in The Paris Review and Granta. She lives in Japan.

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator and editor based in New York City. Her translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Fuminori Nakamura, and Kanako Nishi, and she was the guest editor for the first Japan issue of Words Without Borders. She maintains the database Japanese Literature in English at www.japaneseliteratureinenglish.com.

Europa Editions