Author Hitomi Kanehara Reveals New Life After Divorce in Her 40s... "My Vision Has Become as Bright as 4K"

"Balancing Parenting and Writing Was a War... I Had to Write Even When I Was Exhausted"

In 2003, at the age of twenty, the 'genius author' Hitomi Kanehara (42), who burst onto the Japanese literary scene with her novel 'Piercing for the Snake', declared a new freedom as she entered her 40s. Her candid and unrestrained essay, which reflects on her 20 years of marriage, has resonated strongly with readers.

According to the literary world, Kanehara recently published her essay collection "You Standing on the Dance Floor and You Sunbathing in Hibiya", which encompasses her 20-year career as a writer and her personal life. This new work goes beyond mere personal anecdotes, capturing the intense struggles she faced between her life as a woman and her calling as a writer.

◆ "The World Changed After My Divorce"... A Record of Liberation

Having married a publishing editor at the young age of 22 and raising two daughters, Kanehara revealed through her book the process of deciding to divorce as she entered her 40s. She expressed her feelings right after the divorce, stating, "It was as if my vision became bright and clear like 4K quality." This symbolically represents the sense of liberation she felt after shedding the pressures of being a wife, mother, and writer all at once for nearly 20 years.

Notably, the column "The Persona of a Mother", which garnered significant social attention when published in the Asahi Shimbun in 2023, is also included in this book.

She recalled, "Balancing parenting and writing was truly a 'heroic' battle." When her children were young, she had to cut back on sleep and forcefully carve out time to write novels, which left her body and mind feeling "exhausted to the point of being worn out." Nevertheless, she revealed her uncompromising passion for creation, stating, "The intense conflict of not being able to stop writing drove me."

◆ Beyond Shock to the Pinnacle of Literature

Born in 1983, Kanehara caused a sensation with her debut work 'Piercing for the Snake', winning both the Subaru Literary Prize and the 130th Akutagawa Prize simultaneously, creating the 'Kanehara Syndrome'. While she was noted for her shocking themes and style at the time, her subsequent career has been a continuous series of literary achievements.

Starting with winning the Oda Sakunosuke Prize for 'TRIP TRAP' in 2010, she has also won the Bunkamura Two-Mago Literary Prize for 'Mothers' in 2012, the Tanizaki Jun'ichirō Prize for 'Unsocial Distance', which sharply captured the COVID era in 2021, and the Shibata Renzaburo Prize for 'Mitsu the World' in 2022, firmly establishing herself as a leading mid-career author in the Japanese literary world.

Through this essay collection, Kanehara states, "I have become free from the things that bound my past self." Readers are looking forward to the new world of '4K vision' that she will show, having transformed her personal pain of divorce into literary nourishment.