Misumi Kubo

Japan

About

Misumi Kubo is an award-winning Japanese novelist known for her unflinching portrayals of women, families, and the pressures of contemporary Japanese society. Born in Tokyo in 1965, she left junior college and worked for an advertising company before becoming a freelance writer and editor, focusing particularly on women’s health and medicine. Her literary breakthrough came in 2009, when her short story Mikumari won the R-18 Literature Prize. Expanded into her debut novel, So We Look to the Sky, the work received the prestigious Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize in 2011 and earned widespread recognition in Japan. Her subsequent novels include Stray Whale on a Sunny Day, which won the Yamada Fūtarō Prize, and Shooting Stars into the Night Sky, which received the Naoki Prize in 2022. Her fiction brings intimate family struggles and overlooked social realities into sharp focus.

Books on TheBookRoads

All genres Literary Fiction Contemporary Fiction Family Drama

All themes Society & Class

Newest first Oldest first

So We Look to the Sky

So We Look to the Sky

In contemporary Japan, one scandal connects the lives of five people struggling with desire, shame, loneliness, and the expectations placed upon them. When a young man’s affair with an older woman is exposed online, the fallout ripples through the lives of teenagers navigating first love, a married couple facing infertility, a young man caring for his grandmother with dementia, and a single mother working as a midwife. Through these interconnected stories, Misumi Kubo explores the intimate realities often hidden behind the surface of everyday life: the pressures on women’s bodies, the stigma surrounding sexuality, poverty, family obligations, and the desperate need for human connection. Unflinching yet deeply compassionate, this award-winning Japanese novel finds hope in the fragile, stubborn force of life itself.

Country

Also from Japan

Akira Mizubayashi

Haruki Murakami

Junichiro Tanizaki

Masashi Matsuie