Mieko Kawakami writes about women and gender, but she wishes society would progress to a point where she didn’t have to. In 2008 she won the Akutagawa Prize, arguably Japan’s most prestigious literary award, for her novella Chichi to Ran, or Breasts and Eggs, which explores body image in modern Japan through the relations between a girl, her mother and her aunt. Kawakami expanded the story into a novel, which will be published in English by Picador in spring 2020.