Mimi Kawahara

Congratulations to Mimi Kawahara, winner of the 2026 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, for “Disaster preparedness test, ex post facto,” which is “devastatingly intimate…[and] accomplishes something exceedingly rare.” (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2026 judge)

When Ricky’s shy, bird-loving daughter, Lina, hangs herself in her dorm room and his wife, Roz, descends into dementia, his life contracts to housework, adult diapers, and vodka, his expertise in emergency management useless.

After Roz dies, Ricky is left with the remnants of their marriage: photographs, books, ashes, jokes, and her voice continuing their decades-long conversation in his head. Tentative connections—with Roz’s nurse and her partner, an Uber driver named Mazen, and a one-eyed dog called Helen—draw him back toward the living. He stops drinking, hopes to help Mazen find a better job, and, watching Helen play with a little boy, is startled to feel something like joy.

Reflecting on his ordeal, he self-administers a disaster preparedness test, which awards him a point for taking leave from work to care for Roz and deducts one for wishing her dead, but assigns most of his memories, impulses, failings, and acts of tenderness a value of zero.

His final score of zero feels precisely wrong—he deems his performance both positive and negative, perhaps skewing negative—yet also exactly right. An imaginary number that is also real, zero is essential to the calculations on which his career depended. Unable to resolve these contradictions, Ricky rests in the steady orbit of Helen’s adoring eye, knowing only that he will care for her as long as he can.

In the collection to which the story belongs, some characters in Ricky’s story appear as protagonists of their own stories.

“My surprise and exaltation upon winning this prize would be hard to overstate. Now, when I sit down to write, I can imagine Sisyphus happy.”

A Roman-born Japanese Jewish linguaphile based in New York, Mimi Kawahara has published in The London Magazine, The Chicago Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, the anthology The Experiment Will Not Be Bound, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in The Idaho Review. Her prize-winning story belongs to a kaleidoscopic collection of interwoven tales whose impersonal forms—such as an index, a Terms of Use agreement, and a Zoom transcript—reveal intricate personal worlds. She is working on a novel and a meta-memoir. When not writing, she sits with people on hospice and has in mind a book about the rewards of intimacy with death.

Visit Mimi’s website, mimikawahara.com

Find Mimi on Instagram @mkawahara29