矢崎存美

Japan

Arimi YAZAKI (矢崎存美) was born in Saitama Prefecture, Japan. She won the Excellence Award in the Hoshi Shinichi Short-Short Contest in 1985 and made her professional fiction debut in 1989. She is best known for the long-running Butabuta series, a healing-fiction franchise about a pink stuffed-pig doll living an ordinary adult life among humans, now past 30 volumes. Her work consistently centers gentle, character-driven short-story collections in which an unusual, faintly magical presence—a doll, a diner, a network of cats—helps ordinary people quietly recover from loss, exhaustion, or isolation. Neko Neko Network and its sister series Diner Tsubame (食堂つばめ) extend this approach into new settings.