Gifted

A moving portrayal of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, shortlisted for Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize.

In 2008, the unnamed narrator of Gifted is working as a hostess and living in Tokyo's nightlife district. One day, her estranged mother, who is seriously ill, suddenly turns up at her door.

As the mother approaches the end of her life, the two women must navigate their strained relationship, while the narrator also reckons with events happening in her own life, including the death of a close friend – all under the bright lights of Tokyo's 'sleepless town', Kabukicho.

In sharp, elegant prose, and based on the author's own experiences as a sex worker, Gifted heralds the breakthrough of an exciting new literary talent.

In this unsentimental novella, a young woman working as a bar hostess and sex worker in Tokyo reckons with several unresolved personal traumas ... Based on Suzuki's own experiences in the adult industry, the book chronicles the young woman's wanderings from bar to bar, hospital to home, with brutal honesty.
— The New Yorker

Demonstrates that death is the only way forward. Oozes with maternal cruelty.
— Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police

Gifted explores beauty, and the body itself, as a troubling inheritance, a complicated gift that, at least for women, belongs to you but is never fully in your control.
— Rebecca Hussey, Words Without Borders