Japanese · 1905–1986
The daughter of a distinguished philologist, Enchi read the Tale of Genji and Edo-period fiction in her father's library instead of finishing school. She wrote plays in the 1920s, published almost nothing through the 1930s, lost her house and all her manuscripts in the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, and had a mastectomy and a hysterectomy in the years that followed. She came back in her fifties and wrote the novels that made her: cold, exact books about women in Meiji and modern households who have no power and use what they have. She spent ten years producing a modern Japanese translation of the Tale of Genji that is still read, won the Tanizaki, Noma and Women's Literature prizes, and was made a Person of Cultural Merit in 1985. Her grandmother's generation supplied the material for The Waiting Years.