'Chilling.' Vogue
'As unusual as it is alluring.' Elle
'Delightfully disturbing.' Refinery 29
'Very powerful.' Sayaka Murata
'Disquieting.' Paula Hawkins
'You will be obsessed.' Leila Slimani
The Woman in the Purple Skirt is being watched. Someone is following her, always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes; what she eats; whom she speaks to. But this invisible observer isn't a stalker - it's much more complicated than that.
Review
A chilling tale of envy and vulnerability. Clear space on your reading list now. - Vogue
A voyeuristic thriller . . . This study in fascination, translated from Japanese, is as unusual as it is alluring. - Elle
Delightfully disturbing . . . Imamura does weird singularly well, and keeps the suspense taut throughout the novel, always teasing an answer to the questions: Why this woman? What makes her so special? What makes any of us worth watching at all? - Refinery 29
Disquieting and wryly funny, The Woman in the Purple Skirt is a taut and compelling depiction of loneliness and obsession. -- Paula Hawkins
Very powerful . . . Meticulous and extremely precise . . . Reading this book made me feel like I was in an unstable and strange world. -- Sayaka Murata
A breathless novel that depicts with sly humor the strange relationship between two women in contemporary Japan. You too will be obsessed with the Woman in the Purple Skirt and held in suspense until the last page. -- Leila Slimani
Imamura definitely has a rare talent for depicting people who are a little out of the ordinary. . . . By the time I got to the end, a powerful sense of the narrator's loneliness forcing its way through the madness gripped my heart. -- Yoko Ogawa
Imamura offers her reader crisp, refreshing prose. The Woman in the Purple Skirt will keep you firmly in its grips with its persistent, disquieting, matter-of-fact style. -- Oyinkan Braithwaite
Reading this novel, you can really hear Natsuko Imamura's unique voice, which comes across quite unsparingly and beautifully. -- Hiromi Kawakami
A superb story . . . I was mesmerized by this narrator. Unlikable men who hold our sympathy are frequently found in fiction, but I don't think I've ever encountered a woman as unappealing as this one who still managed to keep me completely beguiled. -- Suichi Yoshida
Part psychological thriller, part study of endemic loneliness . . . a clever, wry and disturbing piece of fiction [and] a sharp examination of personality and persona and the small terrors of everyday life. -- Catherine Taylor - Irish Times
Horrifying, humorous, whimsical, and disturbing . . . It will remain with you. - Tokyo Shimbun
A novel unlike anything that's come before it . . . This strange and unsettling story about control and paranoia will likely take 2021 by storm. - Metropolis
Delightfully disturbing . . . Imamura does weird singularly well, and keeps the suspense taut throughout. - Yahoo!Life
A coolly febrile psychological caper that ultimately portrays the very business of third-person narration - usually seen as an
act of imaginative sympathy - as a stalking of sorts. - Financial Times
Book Description
Clever, bewildering and darkly comic, The Woman in the Purple Skirt is the story of two women whose lives are set to become terribly entwined.
About the Author
Natsuko Imamura was born in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1980. Her fiction has won various prestigious Japanese literary prizes, including the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Mishima Yukio Prize, and the Akutagawa Prize. She lives in Osaka with her husband and daughter.
Lucy North is a British translator of Japanese fiction and non-fiction. Her translations include The Woman in the Purple Skirt, published in 2021, Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, as yet the sole book of fiction in English by Taeko Kono, and Record of a Night Too Brief, a collection of stories by Hiromi Kawakami. Her fiction translations have appeared in Granta, Words Without Borders, and The Southern Review and in several anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature. She lives in Hastings, East Sussex.