Nahoko Uehashi

Nahoko Uehashi is a Japanese writer of children’s literature and a cultural anthropologist about the Australian native people, Aborigines. Now she teaches cultural anthropology in Kawamura Gakuen Woman’s University.

Simple Biology

In 1962 she was born in Tokyo. She loved reading books and manga. When she was a high school student she wanted to be a cartooner. However she thought that she was not good at drawing and gave up being it.

After graduating from her high school, she enrolled at Rikkyo University and studied cultural anthropology. She majored in it and studied female repellent. She went to Okinawa for field work and was advised to try to do it in a place where the spoken language is different. She chose Australia as the place and researched about Yamatji which is one of the tribes of Aborigines. She has studied about them until now and taught about cultural anthropology in Kawamura Gakuen Woman’s University

Her career as a writer started in 1989. She published her first work “Seirei-no-Ki (Spirit Tree)”. From that year she has written many stories until today.

Fictional Works

Shika-no-Oh series (King of the Deers)

Van, a man who was the top of the “Dokkaku (a kind of army)” , Yuna, a young girl who was saved by Van and Hossal, a doctor, had fought with the mysterious sickness named “Mizzal (black-wolf fever)”.

Kemono-no-Soja series (The Beast Player)

Erin, an orphan girl met with a sacred young animal and grew with it experiencing various things, meeting with a lot of people and learning about what the creatures are.

Koteki-no-Kanata (Beyond the Fox Whistle)

A twelve-year-old girl, Sayo, saved a young fox. He was actually a fox spirit living in the gap which is between the real and gods’ world. The two got involved in the fight for territory but they grew their love by trying to solve the problems.

Moribito-Series

A woman bodyguard, Balsa, was asked by a second queen to save the second prince from assassins. From the journey to escape from the assassins, they visited various places and learned lots of things about spirits and the world which they live in.

Tsuki-no-Mori ni Kami yo Nemure (Sleep in the Moon Forest, God)

Tayata was a god of snakes living in the Moon Forest. However his fiance allowed villagers to seal gods in the forest. This is the story of the balance of the relationship between gods, humans and nature.

Seirei-no-Ki (Spirit Tree)

The earth had gone under because of the environmental destruction and the human beings had lived on other planets. A boy and his cousin knew that one tribe was coming to their planet, but they were embroiled in the troubles.

Study

When she enrolled at the university, she wanted to learn about western history. However she gave up learning it because the ancient language was too difficult for her. Then at that time she found a seminar of the African spiritual world. African spiritual things were completely new for her and she got interested in them.

In graduate school she learned about Menstrual Pollution and Avoidance of Women. She went to Okinawa to collect detailed datas and compare them. She thought that it was a really nice time for her and decided to do field work in a completely different and remote place.

She found an internship in Australia as an elementary school teacher. She went there in 1990 and studied about Yamatji. She constantly went there after that year and wrote a book,” Tonari-no-Aborijini (The next aborigine)” in 2010.

Also she got 15th Japanese Cultural Anthropology Association Award in 2020 with her studies.

Awards

She has gotten 18 awards in total until 2020. Since her second fictional book she got awards for each work. Also her books were translated into some languages and some of her books in English got 4 awards from the American Library Association.

The biggest award she has got was the Hans Christian Andersen Award as an author in 2014. The award was an international publication award of children’s literature and it is called “small Nobel prize”.

References

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