Aftermath (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Mary Yukari Waters was born in 1965 in Kyoto, Japan. The daughter of a Japanese homemaker and an Irish American physicist, Waters lived in Kyoto until the age of nine, when her family moved to a small logging town in Northern California, where she spent the rest of her childhood and adolescence. Although she lived in the United States after the age of nine, Waters frequently visited relatives in Japan after moving to California. After studying economics in college, Waters worked as a certified public accountant in Los Angeles for many years, before starting to write fiction at the age of 30.

In 2003, Waters published her first collection of short stories entitled The Laws of Evening, in which "Aftermath" appears. The short stories in The Laws of Evening focus on the lives of people living in Japan after World War II, and although the stories are not autobiographical, Waters has said that she drew on the experiences of her grandmother and other elderly people she knew while growing up to write about Japanese culture during the time in which the book is set.

Most of the short stories in The Laws of Evening were previously published in literary journals such as Shenandoah, Triquarterly, The Missouri Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story. "Aftermath" was first published in the journal Manoa and was also reprinted in the collection The Best American Short Stories 2002. Other short stories in Waters' collection have appeared in the anthologies The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002, The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Short Stories 2003.

Waters earned her master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine. She is the recipient of a 2002 National Endowment for the Arts literature grant and a 2004 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book Award.