Fumio Yamamoto burst onto the Japanese literary scene in 1999 when she won the Yoshikawa Eiji New Writer's Prize for her book Loveaholic. Her follow-up in 2000, The Dilemmas of Working Women, won the prestigious Naoki Prize in Literature, before becoming a bestselling phenomenon. Her final novel, Rotations and Revolutions, was awarded both the Shimasei Literature Prize and the Ch¿¿ K¿ron Prize in 2021, and her journals, offering an intimate portrait of dealing with depression and then with pancreatic cancer, also became hugely popular. Yamamoto passed away in 2021 in Karuizawa, Nagano.

Brian Bergstrom is a lecturer and translator who has lived in Chicago, Kyoto, and Yokohama, and is currently based in Montréal. His most recent translations include Sunrise: Radiant Stories by award-winning author Erika Kobayashi and Slow Down by Marxist philosopher K¿hei Sait¿.