Kumi Kimura (born 1976) is a Japanese novelist born in Hyogo Prefecture and based in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture. Raised in Sendai, she graduated from the Faculty of Letters at Meiji Gakuin University and worked in a bookstore and an office before making her literary debut in 2006, when “Fūka Suru Onna” received the Bungakukai Prize for New Writers. Her fiction examines loneliness, financial insecurity, and imbalances of power within families and relationships through closely observed daily life and the shifting emotions of her characters. She received the Bunkamura Deux Magots Literary Prize for "Anata ni Anzen na Hito." Her representative novel, "Kuma wa Doko ni Iru no," won the 2025 Tanizaki Junichiro Prize and follows four women—two living in a remote refuge from violence, one who lost the foundations of her life in the tsunami, and one who moved to the disaster-stricken region—whose lives intersect around an unidentified young child seven years after the earthquake.
