The Village Beyond the Mist

About the Author

Sachiko Kashiwaba is a prolific writer of children's and young adult fantasy whose career spans more than four decades. Her works have garnered the prestigious Sankei, Shogakukan, and Noma children's literature awards, and her novel The Village Beyond the Mist inspired Hayao Miyazaki's film Spirited Away. Her works have recently been animated as the films The Wonderland and The House of the Lost on the Cape, and her novel Temple Alley Summer, illustrated by Miho Satake and translated by Avery Fischer Udagawa, won the American Library Association's 2022 Mildred L. Batchelder Award. She lives in Morioka, Iwate.

Avery Fischer Udagawa grew up in Kansas and studied English and Asian Studies at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. She holds an MA in advanced Japanese studies from the University of Sheffield. She has studied at Nanzan University, Nagoya, on a Fulbright fellowship, and at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, Yokohama. She writes, translates and works in international education near Bangkok, where she lives with her bicultural family.

Miho Satake is a Japanese artist and illustrator. She is best known for illustrating the Japanese editions of several classic children's books including Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, three books in the Kiki's Delivery Service series by Eiko Kadono, and the twentieth-anniversary edition of the Harry Potter series. In addition to illustrating classic children's literature, her work spans a wide range of genres, including fantasy and realism.