KAIKO TAKESHI

Kaiko Takeshi, given name Ken, was a novelist, essayist, and literary critic in postwar Japan. Kaiko attended Osaka University in the early 1950s and was a contributor to the literary journal Enpitsu (Pencil). In 1952, he married Maki Yoko, and through her found an ad-writing job in Tokyo working for a brewing company. Kaiko won the Akutagawa Ryunosuke Prize for Hadaka no osama (1957; tr. The Naked King, 1977) and left his job to become a full-time writer. In 1964, he was sent to Vietnam by the Asahi newspaper as a special correspondent and was one of 17 survivors of a machine gun raid. Along with the Akutagawa Prize, Kaiko was awarded the Mainichi Literary Prize (1968), the Kawabata Yasunari Prize (1979), the Kikuchi Kan Prize (1981), and the Japanese Literature Prize (1987). He died at the age of 58 of esophageal cancer. Shueisha established the Kaiko Takeshi Nonfiction Prize, which honors well-written nonfiction books.

See also PUBLISHING HOUSES; SHIBATA SHO.