Tsujimura is an award-winning novelist, she is best known for her mystery and children novels. She studied at Chiba University and won the Naoki Prize in 2012 for Kagi no nai Yume wo Miru (I Saw a Dream Without a Key), and in 2018 she won the Japan Booksellers' Award for her novel Kagami no Kojo (Lonely Castle in the Mirror).
Utterly astonishing. I’ve never read something that portrayed its imperfect characters so well - the comfort of hiding in a world of magic realism, the empty incompleteness of a broken nuclear family, the horror of someone spiraling into madness while maintaining a semblance of external normalcy. The Japanese fiction I’ve read is always unapologetic about revealing the cruelty of humanity compared to English fiction, but it makes the moments of simple kindness even more rewarding for the reader.