Fumiko Ohama (born 1958) is a Japanese fiction writer from Tokyo. She studied French literature at Keio University, completed a master’s degree at Paris VII University and has lived in Germany since 1995. Her fiction moves between everyday life and unfamiliar realms, exploring the uncertain boundaries of memory and reality. Her collection “Hidamari no Hate,” whose title suggests the far edge of a sunlit place, won the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature in 2022. Its six stories examine ageing, recollection, life and death. In one, a volunteer visiting an elderly woman finds that her accounts of the past, poised between invention and truth, become entangled with the listener’s own memories. The title story follows an older person’s recurring recollections. Through such encounters, Ohama depicts how listening to others and revisiting the past can transform the apparent familiarity of ordinary life.
