Born in Tokyo, Minae Mizumura moved with her family to Long Island, New York when she was twelve, and later went on to study French Literature at Yale College. While at Yale Graduate School, she published "Renunciation" (Yale French Studies 69, 1985), a critical essay on the work of Paul de Man, shortly after his death. After finishing her M.Phil. program, Mizumura returned to Japan to devote herself to writing fiction.

Mizumura's first novel, Zoku Light and Darkness, Continued (Meian, Chikuma Shobo, 1990) completed the unfinished classic Light and Darkness (Meian, 1917), by Natsume Soseki (1865-1917), perhaps the greatest modern Japanese novelist. It put an end to the long-standing controversies among writers, critics, and scholars as to how Soseki's final work would have concluded. Written in Soseki's now-archaic and idiosyncratic style, Zoku Meian won the Geijutsu Sensho Shinjin Sho (Minister of Education Award for New Artists, 1991).

Mizumura's second novel, A Personal Novel (Shishosetsu from left to right, Shinchosha, 1995), is an autobiographical work in which a horizontally printed Japanese/English bilingual text, appearing for the first time in Japanese literature, portrays the author's life as an expatriate's daughter who comes of age in the U.S. while obsessed with reading Japanese literature. The book won the Noma Shinjin Sho (Noma New Author Award, 1996).

Her third and most recent novel, A Real Novel (Honkaku Shosetsu, Shinchosha, 2002) is a retelling of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights in postwar Japan, featuring a half-Chinese, half-Japanese Heathcliff. It received the Yomiuri Bungaku Sho (Yomiuri Literature Award, 2003), a major literary award whose past winners include novelists Kenzaburo Oe, Kobo Abe, and Yukio Mishima. Editions du Seuil will be publishing a French translation while Adriana Hidalgo Editora will be publishing a Spanish translation.

Mizumura's novels won her a wide readership, while at the same time receiving critical acclaim. In non-fiction, Mizumura has co-authored a book about reading literature called Letters with Bookmarks Attached (Tegami, Shiori wo Soete, Asahi Shimbunsha, 1998), a compilation of epistolary essays she and another novelist, Tsuji Kunio, serialized in the newspaper, Asahi Shimbun. A Korean translation was published in 2003. Mizumura has also written many critical articles and essays, most of which will be collected and published in two volumes in 2004 by Chikuma Shobo.

Mizumura has taught modern Japanese literature at Princeton, the University of Michigan, and Stanford, and was a resident novelist in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.