Koyama-San's Notebooks - by Koyama-San Notebook Workshop (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Ikiru Book Prize-winning collection of diaries from a homeless woman in Tokyo, recording her relationships, daily experiences, and dreams of a better future.

In early 2000s Tokyo, middle-aged Koyama-san has slipped through the economic cracks of a contracting economy and now lives with her domineering partner in the "Blue Tent Village" homeless community in a major city park. When money and health allow, she visits coffee shops, where she records her thoughts in notebooks: reflections on her daily joys and struggles, on the currents of violence in her relationship, on her dreams of one day living and writing in a Paris apartment, and on her own personal transformation via her life in the park: "How much more complex my inner life has become . . . I'm free, and at the same time, unfree."

Recovered and posthumously edited by a feminist collective led by women who knew the author, this Ikiru Book Prize-winning collection gathers Koyama-san's notebooks, which reveal a startling parallel economic world within Tokyo and the practices of compassion, grace, and resilience by which one woman endured it.

Review Quotes

"Truly moving." --Asahi Shimbun

"What is striking is the author's rich sensitivity to the small events of everyday life and the subtle changes of the seasons. At its core are feelings of gratitude and compassion rather than resentment towards society, and the whole is permeated by a sense of human dignity. . . . Here is certainly evidence that a sensitive woman once lived in this world." --Weekly Economist

About the Author

Starting March 2015, the Koyama-san Notebook Workshop met about once a month to transcribe the handwritten notebooks left behind by Koyama-san, to retrace the paths she walked and wrote about, and to discuss and host public readings of her work. Over time, the diverse group has included homeless people, hikkikomori (or recluses), non-regular workers, artists, international students, and researchers.

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a Japanese to English translator. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she currently lives in New York City.

Born to peripatetic Japanese parents in the midst of a tropical storm in British Hong Kong, Chikako Kobayashi grew up in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and a few cities in the US. She is the translator from the Japanese of the novels The Horse and I by Genki Kawamura and God's Boat by Kaori Ekuni, as well as several short stories for Words Without Borders, the Japan PEN Club, and others. She now lives in Tokyo with her partner and an unmanageable number of potted plants.