Snakes and Earrings (Hebi ni Piasu)

Winner of the Subaru Prize for Literature 2003

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize 2004

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Running away from home into an unfettered new existence within Japan's underground youth culture, eighteen-year-old Liu befriends the seductive, body-pierced Ama &mysterious tattoo artist Shiba, friends whose increasingly reckless behavior forces Liu to make difficult choices.

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Hitomi Kanehara was born in Tokyo on August 8, 1983. She was awarded the Subaru Prize for Literature in 2003 & the Akutagawa Prize in 2004 for her first novel, Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings). One of the judges, celebrated writer Ryu Murakami, said her book was 'easily the top choice, receiving the highest marks of any work since I became a member of the selection panel'. The Japanese edition of Snakes and Earrings has since topped bestseller lists & sold over a million copies. Her second novel, Ash Baby, was published in Japan in 2004.

David Karashima is an author whose first novel, in Japanese, was recipient of a prize for new writers; he is also a widely published translator of contemporary Japanese fiction into English, having translated works by Hitomi Kanehara, Taichi Yamada, Yasutaka Tsutsui, & Hisaki Matsuura, among others. In 2008 he helped found the Read Japan initiative at the Nippon Foundation, a partnership among authors, translators, editors, publishers, & universities to facilitate the publication of Japanese literature in translation.