¡°I¡¯m here, but I can¡¯t find the entrance,¡± Kotomi Li texts as our interview time approaches. When my interpreter and I rush down the stairs, she¡¯s already halfway up: a petite woman with straight bangs and streaks of pink and purple dye in her hair for the spring season. We laugh and shake hands all around. I¡¯m somewhat mortified that my first meeting with an Akutagawa Prize-winning author is in a dingy staircase next to old mops and brooms. Up we go to the rented room, where we make ourselves comfortable and Li sets her laptop, covered in Pride stickers, down on the coffee table between us.
The past three years have seen tremendous peaks and valleys for Li. As the critically acclaimed author of ¡°Solo Dance¡± and other fiction that explores topics of queer identity and migration, she has built a formidable career for herself and received some of Japan¡¯s highest literary accolades. But she has also been dealing with vicious cyberbullying, doxxing and harassment.
Throughout my interview, Li appears serene, smiling with confidence. ¡°I am more persistent than most,¡± she declared in an in response to her harassment. ¡°If I weren¡¯t so tenacious I wouldn¡¯t have made it this far. Authors are tenacious creatures to begin with.¡±
Li, 35, hails from rural Taiwan. As a child, she was a voracious reader of both Chinese classics and contemporary literature. She began studying Japanese at age 15 for no particular reason beyond enjoying the language, but soon came to love reading Japanese books. Rieko Matsuura and Kaho Nakayama, authors known for their provocative explorations of gender and sexuality, were among her favorite writers.
Li went on to major in Chinese and Japanese literature at the prestigious National Taiwan University, becoming fluent in Japanese by the time she graduated with her bachelor¡¯s degree.
She studied at Waseda University as an exchange student and later moved to Tokyo to pursue her master¡¯s. Relocating to Japan was also a means for her to escape the severe oppression and discrimination she had experienced in Taiwan as a transgender woman and a lesbian. The capital had more queer spaces than Taipei, which had only two lesbian bars at the time, and Li quickly established a safe space of her own within the LGBTQ community.
Li had written several short stories as a young adult in Taiwan, but found the literary industry difficult to break into. She contemplated giving up her dream entirely and becoming an academic or office worker. Even after she received her master¡¯s from Waseda, she felt intimidated by the idea of writing in Japanese.
Writing literature in one¡¯s native language is challenging enough, she says, for all...
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