NATSUO KIRINO (桐野夏生), born in 1951 in Kanazawa (Ishikawa Prefecture) was an active and spirited child brought up between her two brothers, one being six years older and the other five years younger than her. Kirino’s father, being an architect, took the family to many cities, and Kirino spent her youth in Sendai, Sapporo, and finally settled in Tokyo when she was fourteen, which is where she has been residing since. Kirino showed glimpses of her talent as a writer in her early stages—she was a child with great deal of curiosity, and also a child who could completely immerse herself in her own unique world of imagination.
After completing her law degree, Kirino worked in various fields before becoming a fictional writer; including scheduling and organizing films to be shown in a movie theater, and working as an editor and writer for a magazine publication. She got married to her present husband when she turned twenty-four, and began writing professionally, after giving birth to her daughter, at age thirty. However, it was not until Kirino was forty-one that she made her major debut. Since then, she has written thirteen full-length novels and three volumes of collective short stories, which are highly acclaimed for her intriguingly intelligent plot development and character portrayal, and her unique perspective of Japanese society after the collapse of the economic bubble.
Books in order of publication (in Japanese and English):
Detective Miro Murano series
Novels
Kao ni furikakaru ame (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993)
Tenshi ni misuterareta yoru (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1994)
Mizu no nemuri hai no yume (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1998)
Dāku [Dark] (Tokyo: Kodansha: 2002)
Short story collection
Rōzu gāden [Rose Garden] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2000)
Fireball Blues
Faiabōru burūsu [Fireball Blues] (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1995)
Faiabōru burūsu 2 [Fireball Blues 2] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2001)
Standalone novels
Auto (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997); English translation by Stephen Snyder as Out (New York: Kodansha, 2003; New York: Vintage, 2005)
Yawarakana hoho (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1999);
Kogen (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2000)
Gyokuran (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2001)
Riaru warudo (Tokyo: Shueisha, 2003); English translation by J. Philip Gabriel as Real World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)
Gurotesuku (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2003); English translation by Rebecca L. Copeland as Grotesque (New York: Knopf, 2007)
Zangyakuki (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2004)
Aimu sōrī mama [I’m sorry, mama.] (Tokyo: Shueisha, 2004)
Tamamoe! (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 2005)
Bōken no kuni (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2005)
Metabora (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2007)
Tōkyō-jima (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2008)
Joshinki (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2008); English translation by Rebecca L. Copeland as The Goddess Chronicle (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2013)
In [In] (Tokyo: Shueisha, 2009)
Nanika aru (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2010)
Yasashii Otona (Tokyo: Chuokoron-Shinsha, 2010)
Poritikon (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2011)
Midori no doku (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2011)
Hapinesu [Happiness] (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2013)
Short story collections
Sabiru kokoro (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1997)
Jiorama [Diorama] (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1998)
Ambosu mundosu [Ambos Mundos] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2005)
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