Satoko Tsushima, known by her pen name Yūko Tsushima, was a Japanese fiction writer, essayist and critic. Tsushima won many of Japan's top literary prizes in her career, including the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, the Yomiuri Prize and the Tanizaki Prize. The New York Times called Tsushima "one of the most important writers of her generation." Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. Tsushima was born in Mitaka, Tokyo, the third child of novelist Osamu Dazai and Michiko Ishihara, a teacher at a girls' school. Her father committed suicide when she was one year old; she later drew on the aftermath of this experience in writing her short story "The Watery Realm". Tsushima's work is often characterized as feminist, though she did not apply this label to her own work. Her writing explores the lives of marginalized people, usually women, who struggle for control of their own lives against societal and family pressures. She has cited Tennessee Williams as a literary influence. Unlike many of her contemporaries, whose writing about women tended to assume a nuclear family, Tsushima wrote about women who had been abandoned by family members. Her stories, several of which draw on her own experience as a single mother, focus on the psychological impact of abandonment on those left behind.