Japanese · b. 1951
Mizumura was taken to Long Island at twelve when her father's company transferred him and spent her American adolescence reading a set of modern Japanese novels her family had brought, refusing to become American. She took a doctorate at Yale in French literature under Paul de Man, taught at Princeton and Michigan, and then went home and started writing in Japanese. Her first book finished Sōseki's unfinished Light and Darkness in his own idiom, a stunt of extraordinary nerve that won the Minister of Education's award for new artists. She has won the Yomiuri, Tanizaki and Noma prizes. The Fall of Language in the Age of English, an essay arguing that English is destroying the world's literary languages, caused a national argument in Japan in 2008 and a second one when it appeared in English. She writes about the specific problem of loving a literature that is being flattened.