A subtle and intimate accounting of a daughter’s final days with her mother, set amid the rush of Tokyo’s red-light district, shortlisted for Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize.
Drawing on her own experiences as a hostess and adult film actor, Gifted—Suzumi Suzuki’s first novel to be translated into English—offers a nuanced, frank, and intimate portrayal of the lives of a mother and daughter getting by (or not) in an industry rarely depicted authentically in literary fiction.
In the last days of her mother’s life, a young woman living in Tokyo’s red-light district is thrust into a split existence. By day, she negotiates her new role as caregiver of an abusive parent. By night, she drifts home from the hospital, goes out with other sex-workers, thinks about quitting smoking, and numbly remembers Eri, a friend who died the summer before. Her sensitivity to the details of her surroundings grounds an otherwise unstable world, one where each interaction requires a subtle negotiation of economic and sexual power, and proximity rarely means intimacy or connection.
“Demonstrates that death is the only way forward. Oozes with maternal cruelty.”—Yoko Ogawa
“There is a vigilance in her sentences. The author takes responsibility for every word.” —Shuichi Yoshida
About the Author
Suzumi Suzuki is a Japanese writer. Since the release of her first book, a sociological study of actresses working in pornographic films, she has published works of both nonfiction and fiction. Suzuki's autobiographical book If You Sell Your Body, Then Goodbye! was adapted into a 2017 Eiji Uchida film. Her novel Gifted was nominated for the 167th Akutagawa Prize, and her novel Graceless was nominated for the 168th Akutagawa Prize.
Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She received the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations and co-translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa. As co-organizer and co-host of the Translating the Future conference, she helped to draft the Manifesto on Literary Translation. She is a founding member of the translator collectives Cedilla & Co. and Strong Women, Soft Power, and maintains the database Japanese Literature in English.
