"Have you ever seen a split tongue?" A man asks her, poking out his forked tongue like that of a snake. While living together with that man, Ama, Lui has a relationship with a sadistic tattoo artist, Shiba. She pierces her tongue, gets a tattoo and becomes absorbed in body modification. Pain and ecstasy, violence and death, passionate love and despair... Yukio Ninagawa, the world#s stage director, cinematizes the shocking debut novel of Hitomi Kanehara, who strikingly portrays the essential qualities of people living in modern times while being honored with the Subaru Prize for Literature and the Akutagawa Awards at the same time.

Hitomi Kanehara - Original Novel

Hitomi Kanehara was born in 1983 and left home as a teenager. During that time, she was emailing stories to her literary father who helped her edit them. "Snakes and Earrings" won the top Japanese literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, in 2004. One of the judges, the celebrated writer Ryu Murakami, said her book was "easily the top choice, receiving the highest marks of any work since I became a member of the selection panel." The Japanese edition of Snakes and Earrings has since topped bestseller lists and sold over a million copies, and also has been published in over 100 countries.

 

 

CREDITS
Yuriko Yoshitaka
Kengo Kora
Arata