Taeko Kono (1926–2015) was a Japanese novelist and literary critic. After graduating from Osaka Women’s College, she joined the literary circle led by Fumio Niwa and pursued her writing while working full-time. She attracted attention when “Yojigari” (“Toddler-Hunting”) won the Shinchosha Coterie Magazine Prize in 1961, and received the Akutagawa Prize for “Kani” (“Crabs”) in 1963. Her fiction brought desire, violence, and masochism into ordinary domestic settings, depicting women’s inner lives outside conventional ideals of motherhood and family. Together with Minako Oba, she became one of the first women to serve on the Akutagawa Prize selection committee, and she received Japan’s Order of Culture in 2014. “Kani” follows a middle-aged woman searching for crabs with her young nephew on the Sotobo coast, revealing troubled emotions beneath an apparently ordinary seaside outing.
