Fumio Yamamoto burst onto the Japanese literary scene in 1999 when she won the Yoshikawa Eiji New Writer's Prize for Loveaholic . Her follow-up in 2000, The Dilemmas of Working Women , won the prestigious Naoki Prize in Literature, before becoming a bestselling phenomenon. She published further successful and acclaimed books - including her journals, which offered an intimate portrait of dealing with depression and then with pancreatic cancer - and passed away in 2021 in Karuizawa, Nagano.