Louise Heal Kawai comes from Manchester in the UK. With the exception of a short detour to Fort Worth, Texas, she has spent the past twenty years in Nagoya, Japan, as a translator and teacher. Her published translations include Daido Tamaki’s Milk, which appeared in the short story anthology Inside and Other Short Fiction; Tendo Shoko’s best-selling autobiography Yakuza Moon; and most recently Building Waves, a novel by feminist writer and poet Tomioka Taeko.  She had a lot of fun translating Breasts and Eggs into Northern English dialect and is currently searching for other interesting literature from the Osaka/Kansai region of Japan.