Gifted

Suzumi Suzuki is an acclaimed Japanese sociologist and columnist. She graduated from Keio University majoring in Environment and Information Studies, and later received a master’s degree from Tokyo University. She worked as an adult video actress before becoming a journalist for Nikkei Inc. She is also the author of Sell Your Body, and It’s Goodbye (2016), Flowers for Love and the Womb (2017), A Prostitute’s Bookshelf (2022), and Letters of Correspondence (2021), co-written with Japan’s most acclaimed feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno. Gifted is her debut novel.Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She received the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa.

‘In this unsentimental novella, a young woman working as a bar hostess and sex worker in Tokyo reckons with several unresolved personal traumas … Based on Suzuki’s own experiences in the adult industry, the book chronicles the young woman’s wanderings from bar to bar, hospital to home, with brutal honesty.’