Natsuko Imamura, born in 1980, is a Japanese novelist from Hiroshima Prefecture. She made her debut after winning the Dazai Osamu Prize in 2010 for “Kochira Amiko,” and a collection featuring the story later received the Mishima Yukio Prize. Her 2019 Akutagawa Prize-winning novel “Murasaki no Sukato no Onna” follows a narrator who obsessively watches a neighborhood woman and tries to become her friend, revealing the loneliness, fixation, and unease beneath everyday life.
