[6] Initially, she wrote only as a hobby, and her husband didn't realise she was a writer until her debut novel, The Breaking of the Butterfly, received a literary prize.
[6] Her novella Pregnancy Diary, written in brief intervals when her son was a toddler, won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature, thus cementing her reputation in Japan.
In 2006, she worked alongside the mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara to co-write "An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics", a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.
"[8] Her English translator, Stephen Snyder, has said that “There is a naturalness to what she writes so it never feels forced...Her narrative seems to be flowing from a source that’s hard to identify.”[6] Frequently, she explores the theme of memory in her works.
[6] Human cruelty features as another prominent theme in her work, as she is interested in exploring what drives people to commit acts of physical or emotional violence.
[10] She also felt influenced by the American author Paul Auster, who she believes “writes a spoken literature—it feels like he’s written down a story someone told him, rather than creating it himself.