Fumio Yamamoto Author

Fumio Yamamoto was a Japanese author of several novels and essays. Leaving her job at a brokerage firm for a literary career, her writing displays a signature blend of humor, romance and piercing social commentary on the place of women in Japanese society. Her book Loveaholic, a workplace novel about a woman who's obsessed with her colleague and starts stalking him, put her on the literary map by winning the 1999 Yoshikawa Eiji New Writer's Prize. Her follow-up in 2000, the collection The Dilemmas of Working Women, won the prestigious Naoki Prize in Literature on its way to becoming a bestselling phenomenon. After a prolific career as both a novelist and beloved essayist, her final novel, Rotations and Revolutions, was awarded both the Shimasei Literature Prize and the Chūo Kōron Prize in 2021. Her journals, offering an intimate portrait of the author dealing with pancreatic cancer, also became hugely popular. In 2021, Yamamoto passed away at the untimely age of 58 in Karuizawa, Nagano.