Adios, Sayonara, Goodbye!

Polly Barton is a Japanese–English translator and writer based in the UK. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki, Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, and There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. Her translation of Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai was awarded a 2023–2024 Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize. Barton is the author of Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History, both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Brian Bergstrom is a lecturer and translator who has lived in Chicago, Kyoto, and Yokohama. His translations have appeared in publications including the Paris Review, Granta, Aperture, Lit Hub, and The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. His translation of Trinity, Trinity, Trinity by Erika Kobayashi won the 2022 Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Bergstrom is currently based in Montréal, Canada.

Hugh Dancy played Will Graham in Hannibal, for which he earned a Saturn Award and two Critics’ Choice nominations. Additional film and television credits include Black Hawk Down, Ella Enchanted, King Arthur, Adam, the television mini-series Elizabeth I, for which he received an Emmy nomination, Blood and Chocolate, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Big C, Deadline Gallipoli, The Path, Late Night, Homeland, The Good Fight, and Downton Abbey: A New Era. On stage, he starred off-Broadway in The Pride and Apologia, and on Broadway in Venus in Fur and the revival of Journey’s End. Dancy currently stars in the reboot of Law & Order and is the voice of Otto Octavius in the animated series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.

Maria Dizzia was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play). She has appeared on stage in MacBeth, Uncle Vanya, Cradle and All, The Hallway Trilogy, The Drunken City, Eurydice, Belleville, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and If I Forget. Her film and television credits include While We’re Young, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Other Woman, Master of None, Horace and Pete, Louie, Royal Pains, Orange Is the New Black, Going in Style, 13 Reasons Why, Red Oaks, Sea Change, Humor Me, Piercing, Vox Lux, William, The Neighbors' Window, Two Against Nature, Shadow Girl, Depraved, Emergence, The Outside Story, The Undoing, Forever Alone, Two Against Nature, Ghostwritten, Funny Pages, The Staircase, The First Lady, The Good Nurse, School Spirits, The Graduates, My Old Ass, Life & Beth, We Strangers, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, and Summer’s End. Dizzia can be seen in the forthcoming projects Dissocia, Plainclothes, The Next Big One: A Comedy with Three Potential Problems, Delusion, and Barbara.

Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. Her first novel, Kamisama (God), was published in 1994. In 1996, she was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for Hebi o Fumu (Tread on a Snake), and in 2001 she won the Tanizaki Prize for her novel Sensei no Kaban (Strange Weather in Tokyo), which became an international bestseller. Strange Weather in Tokyo was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 International Foreign Fiction Prize. Hiromi Kawakami has contributed to editions of Granta in both the UK and Japan and is one of Japan's most popular contemporary novelists. Her latest novel, Under the Eye of the Big Bird, was published in September.

Erika Kobayashi is a visual artist based in Tokyo and the author of Trinity, Trinity, Trinity. Her novel Breakfast with Madame Curie, published in 2014 by Shueisha, was shortlisted for both the Mishima and the Akutagawa Prize. Sunrise: Radiant Stories is her second work of fiction to be published in English.

Aoko Matsuda is a writer and translator. In 2013, her debut book, Stackable, was nominated for the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. In 2019, her short story “The Woman Dies,” published on Granta online, was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. In 2021, Her short story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are, published by Soft Skull Press, was highly praised by the BBC, Guardian, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was selected as one of the 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020 by Time Magazine. It was nominated for a Ray Bradbury Prize sponsored by the LA Times and won The Firecracker Award in the fiction category and World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2021. Matsuda has translated work by Karen Russell, Amelia Gray, and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese.

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She received the 2020 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Hiromi Kawakami’s The Ten Loves of Nishino, and her translation of Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami was nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Additional translations and co-translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and Kaoru Takamura. Powell maintains the database Japanese Literature in English and is a founding member of the collectives Cedilla & Co. and Strong Women, Soft Power.

Rita Wolf has been featured in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance with the Transport Group and Out of Time at The Public Theater, both co-productions with The National Asian American Theatre Company; and The Michaels and What Happened? The Michaels Abroad, written and directed by Richard Nelson, at The Public Theater and Hunter College. Additional theater credits include An Ordinary Muslim at New York Theatre Workshop, The American Pilot at Manhattan Theatre Club, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and the premiere of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at New York Theatre Workshop and BAM. Last spring, Wolf was a Beinecke Fellow at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University while appearing in Caryl Churchill's play Escaped Alone. Her film and TV work includes Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears film My Beautiful Laundrette.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.

CREDITS

“Sunrise,” by Erika Kobayashi, translated by Brian Bergstrom. Excerpted from Sunrise: Radiant Stories, copyright © 2023 by Erika Kobayashi. Translation and translator’s afterword © 2023 by Brian Bergstrom. Used by permission of Astra Publishing House. English text used by permission of Brian Bergstrom.

“Hawaii,” by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton, as published in Monkey Magazine (2024). Copyright © 2024 by Aoko Matsuda. English translation © 2024 by Polly Barton. Used by permission of Fortuna Co., Ltd. English text used by permission of the translator.

“I Won’t Let You Go,” by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Allison Markin Powell, as published in Granta (January 31, 2023). Copyright © 2023 by Hiromi Kawakami. English translation © 2023 by Allison Markin Powell. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC. English text used by permission of the translator.