Michiko Kakutani

Kakutani, a Japanese American, was born on January 9, 1955, in New Haven, Connecticut. She is the only child of Yale mathematician Shizuo Kakutani and his wife Keiko ("Kay") Uchida. Her father was born in Japan, her mother was a second-generation Japanese-American who was raised in Berkeley, California.[1][2] Michiko received her B.A. in English literature from Yale University in 1976, where she studied under author and Yale writing professor John Hersey, among others.[3]

Kakutani initially worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, and then from 1977 to 1979 for Time magazine, where Hersey had worked. In 1979, she joined The New York Times as a reporter.[3]

Kakutani worked as a literary critic for The New York Times from 1983 until her retirement in 2017.[3] Her periodically harsh reviews of some prominent authors have garnered both attention and, on occasion, criticism. For example, in 2006, Kakutani called Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass". Franzen reportedly subsequently called Kakutani "the stupidest person in New York City".[4][5] Another example is that, in 2012, Kakutani wrote a negative review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile.[6] In 2018, Taleb stated in his book Skin in the Game that "someone has to have read the book to notice that a reviewer is full of baloney, so in the absence of skin in the game, reviewers such as Michiko Kakutani" can "go on forever without anyone knowing" that they are fabricating and drunk.[7] According to Kira Cochrane in The Guardian, such counterattacks may have bolstered Kakutani's reputation as commendably "fearless".[4]

She has been known to write reviews in the voice of movie or book characters, including Brian Griffin,[8] Austin Powers,[9] Holden Caulfield,[10] Elle Woods of Legally Blonde,[11] and Truman Capote's character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's.[12]

On July 19, 2007, The New York Times published a pre-release story written by Kakutani about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. An account of the ensuing controversy, including the critical comments of some Harry Potter fans, can be found on the newspaper's Public Editor's blog.[13]

Kakutani was parodied in the essay "I Am Michiko Kakutani" by one of her former Yale classmates, Colin McEnroe.[14]

Kakutani announced that she was stepping down as chief book critic of the Times on July 27, 2017.[5][15] In an article summing her book reviewing career, a writer in Vanity Fair called her "the most powerful book critic in the English-speaking world" and credited her with boosting the careers of George Saunders, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith.[5]

In July 2018, Kakutani published a book criticizing the Trump administration titled The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.[16]

Kakutani is a fan of the New York Yankees.[17][18] Her aunt, Yoshiko Uchida, was an author of children's books.[1]