Aki Asahina (born 1981) is a Japanese novelist and physician from Kyoto Prefecture. He made his literary debut in 2021 after winning the Hayashi Fumiko Literary Prize while working as a doctor. His fiction explores bodily experience and consciousness, questioning the boundaries between self and other, life and death. His novel “Sanshouuo no Shijukunichi,” whose title refers to a salamander’s forty-ninth day, won the Akutagawa Prize in 2024. It follows An and Shun, conjoined twin sisters who share a single body and appear to those around them to be one person. Through their distinct perceptions and everyday experiences, the novel asks how consciousness relates to the body and where one person ends and another begins. Drawing on his medical experience, Asahina approaches the body through the sensations and awareness of the person inhabiting it, exploring forms of existence that challenge familiar assumptions about individuality.
