Naomi Osaka

October 30, 2023
Racquet magazine editor Rothenberg (The Stylish Life) serves up a compassionate if unrevealing biography of the tennis phenom. Born in Japan in 1997, Osaka started playing the sport when she was still a toddler, practicing alongside her older sister and coached by her father, who sought to emulate the strategies and success of Venus and Serena Williams’s father, Richard. The Osakas moved to the U.S. in 2001 so Naomi and her sister would have more opportunities to pursue tennis (at the time, “Japan had little success producing professional tennis stars”). Highlighting the struggles Osaka faced growing up, Rothenberg notes that “onlookers and park administrators repeatedly called police on the family to interrupt the long hours spent training his daughters on the courts” in Queens, N.Y., and that the family was barely scraping by financially while Osaka was finding her footing in the tennis world. However, by age 16, Osaka had earned recognition for her ferocious serves, which clocked in at over 100 miles per hour. She went on to win four Grand Slams from 2018 to 2021, before taking a three-month hiatus in 2021 to tend to her mental health, and then stepping back again in 2023 to have a child. Rothenberg provides exciting accounts of key matches and a sensitive treatment of Osaka’s public battle with depression, but his subject remains something of an enigma, with the shy superstar’s inner life never quite coming into focus. Still, Osaka’s fans will lap this up.