Draft:Erika Kobayashi

Erika Kobayashi (小林エリカ, Kobayashi Erika) is a Japanese author, esperantist, multi-media installation artist, and manga artist. She began publishing her work professionally in 2001 and is still active today, recently working alongside translator Brian Bergstrom.

Personal life
Erika Kobayashi (小林エリカ, Kobayashi Erika) was born on January 24, 1978 in Tokyo, Japan to Tsukasa Kobayashi (小林司, Kobayashi Tsukasa) and Akane Higashiyama (東山あかね, Higashiyama Akane), two high-profile Japanese translators of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. She was raised in Ōizumi (大泉), a small town within the Nerima City Ward (練馬区, Nerima-ku) on the outskirts of Tokyo. In 2020 Kobayashi revealed that she has a child.

Career
In 2001 She received a masters degree from the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies (東京大学・学際情報学府, Tōkyō Daigaku Gakusai Jōhōgakubu). Subsequently, she began publishing her work.

In 2003 Kobayashi was appointed as the Japan Foundation's Banff Center artist in residence, and, in 2006 as the Nomura International Cultural Foundation's artist in residence at EAA in Estonia, and at CAMAC in France. In 2010 alongside fellow Japanese esperantists Mina Tabei, Kasane Nogawa, and Hisae Maeda, Kobayashi founded the Tokyo based studio “kvina”, and began producing LIBRO de KVINA, a book series in Japanese, English, and Esperanto. In 2023, Kobayashi was selected by AC Japan as lead illustrator for Plan International's "I Didn't Even Know I had a Different Life" (私に違う人生があることすら知らなかった), an advertising campaign that advocates for women's education globally, lead by the NGO's Japanese branch.

Literary Focuses
Kobayashi's novels explicate the nature of histories and memories of radiation across generations through her exploration of the lives of women. Chiefly through the relationships of mothers, daughters, and granddaughters, and birth and death. Her examinations seek to make that which is invisible, (namely illness, radiation, and the lives of the isolated) visible. In addition to the scientific history of radiation, Kobayashi takes interest in the events with which its history is deeply entangled; the atomic bomb, the Great East Japan Earthquake, the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and 2020 are all topics that her works have investigated. Many of Kobayashi's exhibitions are based on her literary works, expanding upon them visually through depictions of light and luminance, again making the unseen, seen.