Eyko Kadono

Eiko Kadono is a Japanese writer and author of stories, essays, and children’s books. She is an invited professor at Nihon Fukushi University (Japanese: 日本福祉大学).

Eiko Kadono was born in Tokyo. Her father did everything he could to fill Eiko’s world from an early age with a variety of stories, especially traditional fairy tales. When Eiko learned to read, she escaped the hardships of postwar Japan by reading books. Her favorite works were the mystery stories of Edogawa Ranpo and Japanese translations of Frances Eliza Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and Tolstoy’s books, including Childhood and Boyhood. She attended Nihon Fukushi University in Aichi Prefecture and later earned a degree in English literature from Waseda University.

After graduating in 1960 at the age of 25, Eiko emigrated to Brazil, where she spent two years. She wrote the story “Visiting Brazil: The Boy Luizinho” (Japanese: ルイジンニョ少年、ブラジルをたずねて, Ruidzinnyo shōnen, Burajiru o tazunete), based on her personal impressions, about a Brazilian boy who loved to dance samba. This was her first work, which was not published until 1970.

Most of her books are intended for children. In 1985, she published the novel Kiki’s Delivery Service (Japanese: 魔女の宅急便), which later served as the basis for the anime film of the same name directed by Hayao Miyazaki. For this book, Eiko Kadono was awarded the Noma Literary Prize for Newcomers for a children’s work, which prompted her to write four more books as sequels.

Kiki’s Delivery Service tells the story of the young witch Kiki and her talking cat Jiji, who leaves home for the unfamiliar seaside town of Koriko to undergo a kind of apprenticeship for young witches. There