Banana Yoshimoto is the prize-winning and internationally bestselling author of Kitchen, N.P., Lizard, Amrita, Asleep and Goodbye Tsugumi. She has published ten books in English translation and her work has been translated and published in over thirty countries. She lives in Tokyo.

Michael Emmerich received a BA from Princeton University. After completing research in Japanese literature studies at Ritsumeikan University in Tokyo, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Columbia University. He was a member of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies department at UC Santa Barbara before joining UCLA in 2013. In addition to his many publications in English and Japanese on early modern, modern, and contemporary Japanese literature, Emmerich is the author of more than a dozen book-length translations of works by writers such as Kawabata Yasunari, Yoshimoto Banana, Takahashi Gen'ichiro, Akasaka Mari, Yamada Taichi, Matsuura Rieko, Kawakami Hiromi, Furukawa Hideo, and Inoue Yasushi. He is also the editor of two books for students of the Japanese language: Read Real Japanese: Fiction and New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese.