だれかのいとしいひと

by Mitsuyo Kakuta, 角田光代

転校生じゃないからという理由でふられた女子高生、ジミ・ヘンドリックスのポスターを盗みに元カレのアパートに忍び込むフリーライター、親友の恋人とひそかにつきあう悪癖のある女の子、誕生日休暇を一人ハワイで過ごすハメになったＯＬ……。どこか不安定で、仕事にも恋に対しても不器用な主人公たち。何度傷ついても、もう二度と恋なんかしないと思っても、まただれかを愛してしまう……切ない８つの恋の形を描く短編小説集。

228 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

Mitsuyo Kakuta (角田光代, 1967–) set her sights on becoming a writer from an early age. Her debut novel—Kōfuku na yūgi (A Blissful Pastime), written while she was a university student—received the Kaien Prize for New Writers in 1990. She has been working continuously as an author ever since, never having had to support herself with a separate job. Three nominations for the Akutagawa Prize serve as a measure of the promise with which she was regarded from early in her career. Then, at the encouragement of an editor, she shifted toward the entertainment end of the literary spectrum, where she garnered a much broader readership with works depicting the lives of women in her generation, from their mid-thirties to forties. After publishing two brilliant novels in 2002, Ekonomikaru paresu (Economical Palace) and Kūchū teien (Hanging Garden), she went on to win the Naoki Prize for the second half of 2004 with Woman on the Other Shore (tr. 2007). Her successes continued with The Eighth Day (tr. 2010), which received the 2007 Chūō Kōron Literary Prize and was made into a televised drama series as well as a movie; the book sold more than a million copies, vaulting her into the ranks of Japan's best-selling authors. In 2012 she added to her list of honors by earning the Shibata Renzaburō Award for her novel Kami no tsuki (Paper Moon), and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for her volume of short stories Kanata no ko (The Children Beyond).

Mitsuyo Kakuta is currently working on translating the Tale of Genji into modern Japanese.
(source: BooksFromJapan.jp)