Yukiko Utashiro (born 1964) is a Japanese nonfiction writer whose reporting spans sports, biographical reportage, and criminal cases. Born in Niigata Prefecture, she graduated from Gakushuin University and worked as an editor at a publishing company before becoming an independent writer. Her contributions to magazines including Fujin Koron, Shincho 45, and AERA draw on interviews with people devoted to their work and with those confronting difficult questions about family and society. In “Seishi Teikyo: Chichioya o Shiranai Kodomotachi,” she investigates donor insemination through the experiences of parents, children, physicians, and sperm donors. Alongside the desire to have a child, she examines the difficulty of disclosing donor conception and the impact of that knowledge on children, approaching reproductive technology through the lives it affects. Her interest in individual lives as a way of understanding an era also informs “Kagami no Naka no Iwasaki Chihiro.” Drawing on diaries, journalistic articles, and testimony from people who knew the artist, she traces Chihiro’s fifty-five years as a painter, wife, and mother, exploring her pursuit of independence in postwar Japan and the experiences behind her art. In “Madame Toki Monogatari,” Utashiro turns to a French restaurant that opened in Daikanyama in 1978. Interviews with its proprietor, staff, and regular customers reveal the work and relationships that sustained its appeal for almost half a century. Across medicine, art, and food, her writing places personal choices and everyday work within a wider social setting, drawing on the words of those involved and documentary evidence.
