Keiichiro Hirano will read from his bestselling novel Eclipse. Hirano's visit to Iowa City is sponsored by the Japan Foundation and the University of Iowa's Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS) and Japanese Program.
Winner of the 2025 Japan - U.S. Friendship Commission Prize (awarded annually by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University), Eclipse is "set at the end of the 15th century, in a small village rampaged by the plague, and...[follows] the travels of a young learned priest and written with elegant prose" (en.k-hirano.com). Peter Gordon of the Asian Review of Books praises Eclipse, saying in a recent review: "Eclipse was published in 1998 when Hirano was still an undergraduate. He was hailed as a prodigy. The book sold 400,000 copies and won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. However curious the effort may seem—the fact that it seems curious is itself curious; Western writers regularly set historical novels in Asia—one can see why: Eclipse is an engaging, thought-provoking and deeply-imagined work."
Keiichiro Hirano has written more than 15 novels since his debut work Eclipse, for which he won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize at the record age of 23. His deeply psychological fiction deals with profound and universal themes like self-love, relationships and acceptance, and spans from short stories and historical novels to essays, love stories, and literary sci-fi. As a cultural envoy to Paris appointed by Japan’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs, he traveled all over Europe giving lectures and many of his books have been translated and are widely read in United States, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, China, Korea, etc. In his widely viewed TED talk, he discusses what it means to really love oneself, arguing that it’s not easy to holistically love ourselves without knowing all our “selves”, good and bad, but we can discover the “self” we like with the help of the person we love.
Hirano will be joined in conversation with Kendall Heitzman, who translates contemporary Japanese fiction and poetry. His translation of Fujino Kaori’s Nails and Eyes (Pushkin Press, 2023) was awarded the Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. His translations of Furukawa Hideo and Takiguchi Yusho appear in recent issues of the literary journal Monkey. His translation of The Neverending Book is forthcoming from WW Norton in April. He teaches Japanese literature and culture at the University of Iowa.
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