Description
About Nao-Cola Yamazaki
Nao-Cola Yamazaki (山崎 ナオコーラ) is a Japanese writer. They pride themselves on writing ‘things no one else can say in words anyone can understand’. They have won the Bungei Prize and the Shimase Award for Love Stories and been nominated multiple times for the Akutagawa Prize. Their first title to be translated into English was FRIENDSHIP FOR GROWN-UPS, a chapbook published by Stranger Press in 2017 and similarly translated by the acclaimed Polly Barton. The Japan Times praised Yamazaki’s ‘skill in evoking the ambiguity of contemporary life’, and called the collection ‘a small book that says a lot about the way we live today’. Their debut novel DON’T LAUGH AT OTHER PEOPLE’S SEX LIVES and their prize-winning BEAUTIFUL DISTANCE published this spring with Daunt Books in the UK, and is set to publish in the US with SJP Lit this September.
Photo credit: Bungeishunju Ltd
About Polly Barton
Polly Barton is a writer and literary translator from the Japanese. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. She has published two works of non-fiction, Fifty Sounds, for which she won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and Porn: An Oral History. Her debut novel, What Am I, A Deer?, was published in 2026.
Photo credit: Garry Loughlin
About Don’t Laugh At Other People’s Sex Lives
A love story that feels both new and achingly true, capturing the intensity, uncertainties and intimacy of falling for someone.
Art student Isogai first models for one of his tutors, the much older Yuri, then begins a passionate affair with her. As he gets to know her better, he struggles to understand his own emotions and his place in the world, just as he yearns to be closer to her and for her to share more of herself with him.
Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives was a smash-hit in Japan, winning the prestigious Bungei Prize, and selling over 250,000 copies. A touching portrait of late adolescence, with Isogai captured with exasperation, humour and tenderness, it is also, and above all else, an exploration of the exhilarating and destabilising experience of a love that defies prediction or explanation.
‘Razor-sharp emotional intelligence beneath a prose style that is as refreshing, as, well, a Diet Coke on a hot summer’s day . . . Pack[s] a devastatingly emotional wallop.’ Crack Magazine
‘A story full of nostalgia and beauty and hope. First love is perfectly imperfect, and Yamazaki renders it here with all the charm and respect that it deserves.’ Sarah Jessica Parker
‘Slyly transgressive, singularly weird – a happy/sad confection of innocence to unsettling experience, and big feelings that go almost totally unsaid. Reminded me of Francoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse mixed with Bae Suah’s Nowhere to Be Found.’ Sharlene Teo
‘A strange and beguiling love affair, one rich in all the distances and intimacies that pull new lovers together. I loved it. I haven’t devoured something like that in a long time.’ Naomi Wood
