INOUE YASUSHI

Inoue Yasushi, a poet and writer of historical fiction, was born in Hokkaido but raised by his grandmother in Shizuoka Prefecture. Inoue attended Kyoto Imperial University where he studied aesthetics and philosophy. In the late 1930s, Inoue temporarily abandoned the writing career he had begun with short stories and poems and became a reporter for the Sunday Mainichi newspaper. He returned to writing after World War II and published two short novels in the same year: Ryoju (1949; tr. The Hunting Gun, 1961) and Togyu (The Bullfight, 1949), for which he won the Akutagawa Ryunosuke Prize. His subsequent historical narratives Roran (1959; tr. Lou-lan, 1959) and Tempyo no iraka (1957; tr. The Roof Tile of Tempyo, 1975) encompassed Chinese and Japanese themes, respectively.