05-05-2025
Li Kotomi: 'I refuse to choose death'
'I'm here, but I can't find the entrance,' Li Kotomi texts as our interview time approaches. When my interpreter and I rush down the stairs, she's already halfway up: a petite woman with straight bangs and streaks of pink and purple dye in her hair for the spring season. We laugh and shake hands all around. I'm somewhat mortified that my first meeting with an Akutagawa Prize-winning author is in a dingy staircase next to old mops and brooms. Up we go to the rented room, where we make ourselves comfortable and Li sets her laptop, covered in Pride stickers, down on the coffee table between us.
The past three years have seen tremendous peaks and valleys for Li. As the critically acclaimed author of 'Solo Dance' and other fiction that explores topics of queer identity and migration, she has built a formidable career for herself and received some of Japan's highest literary accolades. But she has also been dealing with vicious cyberbullying, doxxing and harassment.
Throughout my interview, Li appears serene, smiling with confidence. 'I am more persistent than most,' she declared in an online statement in response to her harassment. 'If I weren't so tenacious I wouldn't have made it this far. Authors are tenacious creatures to begin with.'
A dedicated student
Li, 35, hails from rural Taiwan. As a child, she was a voracious reader of both Chinese classics and contemporary literature. She began studying Japanese at age 15 for no particular reason beyond enjoying the language, but soon came to love reading Japanese books. Rieko Matsuura and Kaho Nakayama, authors known for their provocative explorations of gender and sexuality, were among her favorite writers.
Li went on to major in Chinese and Japanese literature at the prestigious National Taiwan University, becoming fluent in Japanese by the time she graduated with her bachelor's degree.
She studied at Waseda University as an exchange student and later moved to Tokyo to pursue her master's. Relocating to Japan was also a means for her to escape the severe oppression and discrimination she had experienced in Taiwan as a transgender woman and a lesbian. The capital had more queer spaces than Taipei, which had only two lesbian bars at the time, and Li quickly established a safe space of her own within the LGBTQ community.
Li had written several short stories as a young adult in Taiwan, but found the literary industry difficult to break into. She contemplated giving up her dream entirely and becoming an academic or office worker. Even after she received her master's from Waseda, she felt intimidated by the idea of writing in Japanese.
Writing literature in one's native language is challenging enough, she says, for all the technical and creative capacities it demands. 'You have to read a lot, you have to learn the culture, you have to know about society and history,' she says. 'I didn't think I could do that in Japanese.'
Li started working at a big Japanese company in Tokyo after receiving her master's. One day, while riding a jam-packed train at rush hour, she wondered if there would be anything more to her life than just commuting to and from the office.
'Then a word came into my heart and that word was 'death,'' Li says. 'As a queer person, 'death' is close to my life. Even when I was a child, I often thought about death. I didn't think I could live past 30. Death is something I couldn't help thinking about. At that time, I started thinking about the word itself (in Japanese). ... And I thought, 'Maybe this could be the beginning of a novel.''
Five months later, she completed what would become her literary breakthrough.
Li submitted the manuscript to the 2017 Gunzo Award for New Writers contest, competing against more than 2,000 submissions. She won top prize. Her story about a young lesbian from Taipei trying to overcome trauma and find connections in Tokyo was published the following year by Kodansha, and came out in English in 2022 as 'Solo Dance' (translated by Arthur Reiji Morris). It's a harrowing tale that details the protagonist's struggles with rejection and mental health.
The Gunzo Award marked the official start of Li's literary career — a dream come true — and established Li as a serious author. In 2018, she quit her day job to focus on her work as a freelance writer and translator of Japanese to Mandarin.
Ascent and adversity
In 2021, Li became the second non-native Japanese speaker and first Taiwanese national to receive the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's top literary award. Her winning book, 'The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom,' was an ambitious project, showcasing Li's linguistic innovation and her love of wordplay. 'In some of the lines, I combine Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese and Okinawan to make a completely new language,' she says.
Overall, she describes her process of writing in Japanese as more analytical than her native language, since she is still able to view it from a distance.
The Akutagawa Prize consolidated Li's literary reputation in both Japan and Taiwan. At the same time, this honor invited a degree of unwanted attention and animosity.
Li received backlash from Japanese conservatives on X, formerly Twitter, for winning the Akutagawa as a foreigner, for publicly criticizing former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and for exploring queer themes in her books.
In the same year, anti-transgender movements led by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) were gaining momentum in Taiwan and Japan. '(In 2021), there also was a case in Taiwan where a transgender woman sued the government for the right to change her legal gender marker without getting gender confirmation surgery,' says Li. The court's ruling in favor of the plaintiff led to a transphobic backlash in Taiwan, around the same time as a similar reaction in Japan when Ochanomizu University, a women's college, began admitting transgender students.
Li's gender identity became a target for online harassers. Individuals from around the world have relentlessly bullied her over the past few years, publicly outing her as transgender and even posting her confidential information. She has shared, in her blog, the anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation she experienced as a result.
Li has since filed multiple lawsuits in both Taiwan and Japan against several individuals, citing defamation, sexual harassment and violation of privacy. Some she has won, while others are ongoing. She is contemplating filing even more, as she still faces innumerable attackers online.
'I should just be writing my books,' she laments. 'It's strange; it's not correct.' But ultimately, she believes her actions to be necessary 'to fight for my own rights and show queer people that you can fight back.'
In response to this online harassment, Li's friends and supporters have rallied to raise funds for her drawn-out legal battles.
'I refuse to choose death,' she wrote in her public statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance. 'Our community has already seen far too much death. ... Yes, there is international solidarity among anti-trans activists. Therefore, I too need the international solidarity of the LGBTQ+ community.'
A bright future
In contrast to the storms raging online and in the courts, Li's day-to-day life is quiet and peaceful. She busies herself with chores, meets with editors, spends time with friends and then writes whenever she has a spare moment — always in the privacy of home. Li has a number of new stories and books in the pipeline.
She is writing a series of travelogues based on her experiences at Pride festivals in Seoul, Zurich and Paris. In August, her book of hybrid fiction and nonfiction about her time at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program will be published. Li reminisces fondly about the program, where she befriended a novelist from Hong Kong and a poet from Korea, strengthening her ties to a global ecosystem of literary professionals.
'I really hope that more of my books can be translated into English, too,' Li says. Her third book, 'The Night of the Shining North Star,' takes place in Shinjuku Ni-chome and features women of all sexualities making connections and conversations. She feels that this book can offer readers a glimpse of Asian history, politics and queer communities.
Li strongly believes that the struggle for queer rights is tied to wider political and social problems. 'We have to acknowledge discrimination: homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia. We have to deal with it. ... What makes my novels different is that I focus on those who are most marginalized and intersectional. That is important to me.'
