9th October 2025
Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Road, London, United Kingdom
Last night I had the great pleasure to meet the multi-award-winning, bestselling Japanese author Mizuki Tsujimura 辻村深月 (big thank you to the Asian literature specialist at the Foyles language department who invited me in June), who was on a UK book tour organised by the Japan Foundation to promote the English release of two of her works - "Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon" (ツナグ) and its sequel "How to Hold Someone in your Heart" (ツナグ 想い人の心得). Tsujimura is a fascinating author who successfully bridges serious literature and popular culture, so the event attracted people ranging from university professors of Asian literature to anime otakus. She has practically won all the major literary prizes in Japan; she made her name writing horror fictions; her mystery, romance and coming-of-age works have been made into bestselling movies and TV series; she was the screenwriter for one of the "Doraemon" movies; and she was even made into an anime character in "Bungou Stray Dogs" next to all the other classic authors. It was never meant to be an in-depth discussion due to time constraint, but if you paid attention to what she mentioned within the hour on top of what we know about her, it was incredible - Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Seichou Matsumoto 松本清張 (Akutagawa Prize-winning author of detective fictions currently very popular in the West), Ango Sakaguchi 坂口安吾 (a post-WWII decadent school author whom she cited as being liberating), the "Persona" JRPG series (which is in turn inspired by Jungian psychology; "You'll never see it coming" indeed!), her native Yamanashi Prefecture and the delicacy of writing about small towns and local people. I am in the middle of going through several of her novels, and this talk just added a great extra level of complexity to it. They are very emotional works and it's not difficult to see why she is so celebrated. I have much more to say, but I will share them at a later stage.
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