Dominique Loreau

About the author

Dominique Loreau is a French essayist who has lived in Japan since the late 1970s. She came to wider attention with L'Art de la simplicité, published in 2005 by Éditions Laffont. The book grew from her personal notes, inspired by observing urban Japanese life — the clutter, the stress, the overflowing interiors — and asking what any of it was really for.

Loreau has described herself as not a writer at all, and her decision to address the book in the feminine was, by her own account, a small, deliberate joke in a world that defaults to the masculine.