Dartmouth Events

Author and Translator Event

Novelist Kaori Fujino, with Translator Kendall Heitzman

A bilingual reading with the author and English translator of the award-winning Nails and Eyes, followed by Q & A

A young girl loses her mother, and her father blindly invites his secret lover into the family home to care for her. Obsessively trying to curate a pristine life, this new interloper remains indifferent to the girl, who seems to record her every move—and she realizes only too late all she has failed to see.

With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes—appearing in English for the first time—builds to a conclusion of disturbing power. Paired with two additional stories of unsettled minds and creeping tension, it introduces a daring new voice in Japanese literature.

Kaori Fujino, a lifelong resident of Kyoto, is best known for fiction that reimagines tropes from horror, science fiction, Hollywood thrillers, urban legends, fairy tales, and museum culture. She holds an MA in aesthetics and art from Doshisha University. In 2013, Fujino was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prominent literary prize, for Nails and Eyes. In the fall of 2017, she was in residence at the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program. Her stories have appeared in English translation in Granta, Monkey, and the US-Japan Women’s Journal. 

Kendall Heitzman is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Iowa, where he teaches literature, film, theater, and the Japanese-to-English translation workshop. He is the author of Enduring Postwar: Yasuoka Shōtarō and Literary Memory in Japan (Vanderbilt University Press, 2019). His translations of Furukawa Hideo appear in recent issues of the literary journal Monkey. His translation of Fujino Kaori’s Nails and Eyes (Pushkin Press, 2023) received the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

Sponsored by: The Japan Foundation (New York), Iowa International Programs, at Dartmouth College’s Leslie Center for the Humanities, Comparative Literature Program, and the Dept. of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages.