Hitomi Kanehara (born 1983) is a Japanese novelist from Tokyo. She made her literary debut in 2003 when "Hebi ni Piasu" received the Subaru Literary Prize, and the same work won the Akutagawa Prize the following year. Her fiction addresses the body, sexuality, dependence, violence, marriage, and parenthood, portraying characters whose inability to accommodate themselves to others leads them toward impulsive or destructive behavior, while exposing the social pressures surrounding their private lives. She received the Junichi Watanabe Literary Prize for "Ataraxia" and the Tanizaki Junichiro Prize for "Unsocial Distance." In her representative work, published in English as "Snakes and Earrings," Lui meets Ama, a young man with a forked tongue, becomes absorbed in piercings and tattooing, and gradually loses sight of the boundaries between pain and pleasure, affection and violence, through her relationships with Ama and the tattoo artist Shiba.