A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shuichi Yoshida was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1968. He is the author of numerous books and has won many Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize for Park Life, and the prestigious Osaragi Jiro Prize and the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award, both of which he received for Villain. Several of his stories have been adapted for Japanese television, and a film based on Villain is due to be released in 2010 in Japan as Akunin. Yoshida lives in Tokyo.

A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Philip Gabriel is professor of Japanese literature at the University of Arizona. He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Senji Kuroi, Akira Yoshimura, Masahiko Shimada, Natsuo Kirino, and Haruki Murakami, including Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore; Underground; Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (co-translator); Sputnik Sweetheart; and South of the Border, West of the Sun. Gabriel is a recipient of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (2006) and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001).