Setsuko Shinoda

is a Japanese writer of the fiction genre. She has won the Shōsetsu Subaru Literary Prize for Newcomers, the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize, the Naoki Prize, the Shibata Renzaburo Prize, a MEXT Award, and the Chuo Koron Literary Prize. Several of her works have been adapted for television.

Early life and education Setsuko Shinoda was born in 1955 in Tokyo. As a child she read manga by Sanpei Shirato as well as books by foreign authors such as L. Frank Baum, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain, and aspired to become a manga artist. She graduated from Tokyo Gakugei University. Before beginning her writing career she worked as a municipal employee in Hachiōji, including working at City Hall and the municipal library. She began taking writing lessons at the Asahi Cultural Center intending to move into public relations, but ended up taking novel writing classes and writing her first novel.

A few months later, Shinoda's book , published by Shueisha, won the 117th Naoki Prize. Onnatachi no jihādo follows the individual stories of five women employees experiencing harassment at an insurance company, focusing on the difficulties they have in a male-dominated society. In 1998 the book was adapted for television by NHK as a 2-episode special titled .

After her Naoki Prize success, several more of Shinoda's works were adapted for television. In 1998 Shinoda's story , a horror story about a cellist whose attempts to help a girl with a brain disease communicate through music lead to her falling in love with him and using previously unknown paranormal powers to hurt other people in his life, was published as a book and adapted by Nippon TV into a television drama starring Koichi Domoto, Miki Nakatani, and Akiko Yada. Her 2000 novel , about the problems experienced by a married couple with vastly different personal incomes, was adapted into a 2003 NHK drama. Her 1995 horror novel , about a pandemic that strikes a town outside Tokyo, was adapted into a 2006 Nippon TV special program.

Shinoda's 2-volume work was published by Shinchosha in 2008. Kasō girei tells the story of two men who start to write a role-playing game, decide instead to use the game as the basis for a new religious movement, gain enough adherents to achieve financial success, then find themselves displaced from the religious organization by women followers. In 2009 Kasō girei received the 22nd Shibata Renzaburo Prize. Shinoda visited small Indian villages for details of setting and character, but based the fictitious Indian crystal trade in the novel on Japan's trade with Brazil and Australia. The book won the 10th Chuo Koron Literary Prize.

An English version of her story "The Long-rumored Food Crisis", which The Japan Times called "a chilling account of moral breakdown after the Big One levels Tokyo", was published in the 2015 collection Hanzai Japan.

Recognition and honors 1990: 3rd Shōsetsu Subaru Literary Prize for Newcomers 1997: 10th Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize 1997: 117th Naoki Prize (1997上) 2009: 22nd Shibata Renzaburo Prize 2011: 61st MEXT Award in Literature 2015: 10th Chuo Koron Literary Prize

2020:

Television adaptations 1998: , NHK adaptation of Onnatachi no jihādo