Toh EnJoe is a Japanese author of literary, scientific and speculative fiction. Born in Hokkaido, he studied physics and mathematics and worked as a researcher and at a software firm before becoming a full-time writer. He has received several awards for his fiction, including the Noma Prize for New Writers, the Nihon SF Taisho Award, and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for Harlequin Butterfly.

David Boyd is assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated novels and stories by Hiroko Oyamada, Masatsugu Ono, and Mieko Kawakami, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa's Slow Boat (Pushkin Press, 2017) won the 2017/2018 Japan-US Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the translation of Japanese literature.

Successful entrepreneur A.A. Abrams is pursing the enigmatic writer Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, who has the ability to write expertly in the language of any place they go. Abrams sinks endless resources into finding the writer, but Tomoyuki Tomoyuki always manages to stay one step ahead, taking off moments before being pinned down. But how does the elusive author move from one place to the next, from one language to the next?