One was the hardboiled mystery, which is another of Copeland’s interests. And there were certain genres that were deemed unsuitable for a woman. Later 20th-century women writers were known to parody these notions, creating monstrous aberrations of womanhood. Their works are draped in kimono and covered in make-up. Women in the early 20th century often wrote with a self-conscious awareness of their gender, performing to almost hyperbolic extremes ideas of femininity. Women writers in the 19th century were expected to conform to socially accepted notions of femininity. She focuses almost exclusively on modern Japanese women writers, examining the way their gender has defined and often confined their literary production. Her other works are now under way to be translated and published around the world.Rebecca Copeland’s research and teaching are informed by questions of both gender and genre. OUT was also nominated for the 2004 MWA Edgar Allan Poe Award in the Best Novel Category, which made Kirino the first Japanese writer to be nominated for this major literary award. Her smash hit novel OUT (Kodansha, 1997) became the first work to be translated into English and other languages. Today, Kirino continues to enthusiastically write in a range of interesting genres. Since then, she has written thirteen full-length novels and three volumes of collective short stories, which are highly acclaimed for her intriguingly intelligent plot development and character portrayal, and her unique perspective of Japanese society after the collapse of the economic bubble. However, it was not until Kirino was forty-one that she made her major debut.

She got married to her present husband when she turned twenty-four, and began writing professionally, after giving birth to her daughter, at age thirty. Kirino showed glimpses of her talent as a writer in her early stages-she was a child with great deal of curiosity, and also a child who could completely immerse herself in her own unique world of imagination.Īfter completing her law degree, Kirino worked in various fields before becoming a fictional writer including scheduling and organizing films to be shown in a movie theater, and working as an editor and writer for a magazine publication. Kirino's father, being an architect, took the family to many cities, and Kirino spent her youth in Sendai, Sapporo, and finally settled in Tokyo when she was fourteen, which is where she has been residing since.

NATSUO KIRINO ( 桐野夏生), born in 1951 in Kanazawa (Ishikawa Prefecture) was an active and spirited child brought up between her two brothers, one being six years older and the other five years younger than her.

Natsuo kirino