Michiko Kakutani (ミチコ・カクタニ, 角谷 美智子, born January 9, 1955) is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017.

[4] Many authors who received such reviews gave harsh public responses: in 2006, Kakutani called Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass."

[6][14] In an article summarizing her book reviewing career, a writer in Vanity Fair called her "the most powerful book critic in the English-speaking world" and credited her with boosting the careers of George Saunders, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith.

In an interview for the book, she argued:[16] With its suspicion of grand, overarching narratives, postmodernism emphasized the role that perspective plays in shaping our readings of texts and events [...] and it opened the once-narrow gates of history to heretofore marginalized points of view.

[21] During her career at The New York Times, Kakutani developed a reputation as an extremely private person who was seldom seen in public, with articles describing her as "mysterious" and "reclusive".

[22][23][24] Shawn McCreesh, writing in New York magazine, said that "you were likelier to have seen a snow leopard in Manhattan than to meet Kakutani in the wild".