Events

Times and Locations

4/16 7pm
Prairie Lights Books (Iowa City, IA)
Kaori Fujino & Kendall Heitzman Bilingual Reading of Nails & Eyes | Prairie Lights Books
No RSVP Required

4/18 4pm
Beloit College, Wright Art Museum Courtyard
Kaori Fujino & Kendall Heitzman Bilingual Reading of Nails & Eyes | Beloit College
No RSVP Required

4/19 5pm
University of Chicago, Franke Institute for the Humanities (Chicago, IL)
Nails and Eyes Author & Translator Event: Kaori Fujino and Kendall Heitzman Tickets, Fri, Apr 19, 2024 at 5:00 PM | Eventbrite
RSVP Required

4/21 4:30pm
Dartmouth College, Rockefeller 106, Class of 1930 Room (Hanover, NH)
Author & Translator Event: Novelist Kaori Fujino, w/ Translator Kendall Heitzman
No RSVP Required

4/22 5:30pm
Boston University, 121 Bay State Road, Riverside Room (Boston, MA)
Author & Translator Event with Kaori Fujino and Kendall Heitzman — Boston University
RSVP Required

4/24 6pm
Kinokuniya New York (New York, NY)
Author & Translator Event with Kaori Fujino and Kendall Heitzman — Kinokuniya USA
No RSVP required

4/25 4pm
Yale University, Humanities Quadrangle 136 (New Haven, CT)
“Nails and Eyes” Reading with Kaori Fujino and Kendall Heitzman

About

Akutagawa Award winning author, Kaori Fujino and her translator, Kendall Heitzman will be travelling through the Midwest and Northeast to speak on her novel, Nails and Eyes. These events will feature a bilingual reading with the author and her translator along with a Q&A session.

About the Book

A young girl loses her mother, and her father blindly invites his secret lover into the family home to care for her. Obsessively trying to curate a pristine life, this new interloper remains indifferent to the girl, who seems to record her every move — and she realizes only too late all that she has failed to see.

With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes — appearing in English for the first time — builds to a conclusion of disturbing power. Paired with two additional stories of unsettled minds and creeping tension, it introduces a daring new voice in Japanese literature.

About the Author

Kaori Fujino, a lifelong resident of Kyoto, is best known for fiction that reimagines tropes from horror, science fiction, Hollywood thrillers, urban legends, fairy tales, and museum culture. She holds an MA in aesthetics and art from Doshisha University. In 2013, Fujino was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prominent literary prize, for Nails and Eyes. In the fall of 2017, she was in residence at the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program. Her stories have appeared in English translation in Granta, Monkey, and the US-Japan Women’s Journal.

About the Translator

Kendall Heitzman is associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Iowa, where he teaches literature, film, theater, and the Japanese-to-English translation workshop. He is the author of Enduring Postwar: Yasuoka Shōtarō and Literary Memory in Japan (Vanderbilt University Press, 2019). His translations of Furukawa Hideo appear in recent issues of the literary journal Monkey. His translation of Fujino Kaori’s Nails and Eyes (Pushkin Press, 2023) received the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

This tour is co-sponsored by the Japan Foundation New York and the University of Iowa’s Center for Asian and Pacific Studies with additional support from Beloit College, University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, Boston University, Kinokuniya New York, and Yale University.