それもまたちいさな光

by Mitsuyo Kakuta, 角田光代

デザイン会社に勤める悠木仁絵は35歳独身。いまの生活に不満はないが、結婚しないまま１人で歳をとっていくのか悩みはじめていた。そんな彼女に思いを寄せる、幼馴染の駒場雄大。雄大と宙ぶらりんな関係のまま恋愛に踏み込めない仁絵には、ある理由があった…。２人の関係はかわるのか？　人生の岐路にたつ大人たちのラブストーリー。「オール讀物」掲載と同時にTBS「開局60周年記念番組」としてラジオドラマ化した、異例のコラボレーション企画原作。

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 10, 2012

About the author

Mitsuyo Kakuta (角田光代, 1967–) set her sights on becoming a writer from an early age. Her debut novel—Kōfuku na yūgi (A Blissful Pastime), written while she was a university student—received the Kaien Prize for New Writers in 1990. She has been working continuously as an author ever since, never having had to support herself with a separate job. Three nominations for the Akutagawa Prize serve as a measure of the promise with which she was regarded from early in her career. Then, at the encouragement of an editor, she shifted toward the entertainment end of the literary spectrum, where she garnered a much broader readership with works depicting the lives of women in her generation, from their mid-thirties to forties. After publishing two brilliant novels in 2002, Ekonomikaru paresu (Economical Palace) and Kūchū teien (Hanging Garden), she went on to win the Naoki Prize for the second half of 2004 with Woman on the Other Shore (tr. 2007). Her successes continued with The Eighth Day (tr. 2010), which received the 2007 Chūō Kōron Literary Prize and was made into a televised drama series as well as a movie; the book sold more than a million copies, vaulting her into the ranks of Japan's best-selling authors. In 2012 she added to her list of honors by earning the Shibata Renzaburō Award for her novel Kami no tsuki (Paper Moon), and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for her volume of short stories Kanata no ko (The Children Beyond).

Mitsuyo Kakuta is currently working on translating the Tale of Genji into modern Japanese.
(source: BooksFromJapan.jp)