White Elephant

• Mako Idemitsu is an established and internationally acclaimed feminist artist and pioneer in the medium of experimental film. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, The Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art, among many others• She is a member of a powerful Japanese family akin to the Rockefellers in the United States. Her father Sazo Idemitsu owns Japanese petroleum company Idemitsu Kozan. White Elephant, though fictional, dramatizes her emancipation from the patriarchal values of this family and will appeal to fiction readers and autobiography fans alike.• Both White Elephant and Mako’s work in other mediums, inflected by her personal upbringing, depict the inner lives of women struggling in male-dominated settings and will appeal to female readers and gender studies enthusiasts• Translator Juliet Winters Carpenter is highly regarded. Her past translations have won the 2014 Lewis Galantiere Award of the American Translators Association and the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 1980• This is the first English language translation of Mako Idemitsu’s debut novel