The Woman in the Purple Skirt (Murasaki no sukāto no onna)

'You will be obsessed.' — LEILA SLIMANI

'It will keep you firmly in its grips.' —  OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE

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.

'Disquieting & wryly funny, The Woman in the Purple Skirt is a taut & compelling depiction of loneliness & obsession.' — PAULA HAWKINS

'Very powerful . . . Reading this book made me feel like I was in an unstable & strange world.' — SAYAKA MURATA

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Natsuko Imamura was born in Hiroshima Prefecture. She has won the Osamu Dazai Prize, the Yukio Mishima Prize & the Akutagawa Prize for her fiction, which in addition to This is Amiko includes The Woman in the Purple Skirt. She lives in Osaka with her husband & daughter. 

Lucy North is the translator of fiction & nonfiction by over half a dozen modern & contemporary Japanese writers, including Taeko Kono, Fumiko Enchi, Hiroko Oyamada, & Hiromi Kawakami. 

Lucy North’s translations include Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories (New Directions, 1996; 2018), 10 stories by Taeko Kono, Record of a Night Too Brief (Pushkin Press, 2017), a collection of 3 stories by Hiromi Kawakami, & The Woman in the Purple Skirt (Faber & Faber & Penguin Books, 2021), a novel by Natsuko Imamura. She lives in Hastings, East Sussex.