Osamu DAZAI (native name: 太宰治, real name Shūji Tsushima) was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as Shayō (The Setting Sun) and Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), are considered modern-day classics in Japan. With a semi-autobiographical style and transparency into his personal life, Dazai’s stories have intrigued the minds of many readers. His books also bring about awareness to a number of important topics such as human nature, mental illness, social relationships, and postwar Japan.

Murō Terumichi, pen name Murō Saisei, was a famous poet and novelist in modern Japanese literature. In 1902, he left Kanazawa High Elementary school (equivalent to junior high school today) and started working as a clerk at the Kanazawa Regional Court. His bosses included Haiku-readers such as Kawagoe Bukotsu (河越風骨) and Akakura　Kinpu (赤倉錦風) who taught him how to read/compose haiku. After numerous applications to local newspapers, his haiku was first published on October 8, 1904 in Kitakuni-Shimbun. この時の号は照文。 Eventually, he also started writing poems and tanka (a Japanese poem of thirty‐one syllables). He started to use his pen name - Saisei - in 1906. The name was an attempt to compete against Kokubu Saito, an active kanshi(Chinese-poetry) writer in the Kanazawa area at the time. He choose "Saisei" to mean "West of the Sai-River" which was the place he grew up. The Uho Temple was located on the left side of the River Sai. Saisei adored the atmosphere of this river and the mountainous sceneries up the river. In 1913, he was invited by Kitahara Hakushu to write for Hakushu’s poem collection “Zanboa”. He befriended Hagiwara Sakutaro through this occasion. In 1916, Saisei and Sakutaro started an unofficial magazine called “Kanjo” (emotions) to publish their work. They continued to publish the magazine until their 32nd issue in 1919. During the same year, Saisei had written for Chūōkōron, a renowned literary magazine in Japan. He had published such literature as “Childhood” and “Awakening to Sexuality” and was gaining publicity as a writer. He published his first Haiku Collection “Gyomindouhatsu-kushu” (『魚眠洞発句集』) in 1929. By the 1930s, he entered his era of writing novels and published a book titled “Goodbye Poem, I am breaking up with you” in 1934 as his declaration of farewell to poetry, but he actually had composed quite a lot of poems even after this public announcement. In 1935, he received the Bungei Konwakai (Discussion Group) Award with his novel “Ani Imouto” (Big Brother and Little Sister). He became part of the committee on the Akutagawa Prize (one of the most prestigious literature award in Japan) and continued until 1942. He also received the Kan Kikuchi Award in 1941. It was after World War II that Saisei established his status as a novelist, producing many excellent novels. "Anzukko"(Apricot-girl) released in 1958 was a partial autobiography based on his daughter Asako. He won the Yomiuri Prize for this piece. Also in 1958, he received the Mainichi Publishing Culture Prize for his review "The biography of my beloved poet". For his classic based novel "Remenants from the Mayfly's diary" (1959), he received the Noma Literary Prize. In the following year, he created the 'Muro Saisei Poet Prize' from the money he received from the prize. He died of cancer in 1962. The full collection of his literature was published both before (by publisher Hibonkaku, 1936–37, 13 Volumes plus 1 attachment) and after (by publisher Shinchosha, 1964–68, 12 Volumes plus 2 attachments) his death . For his poetry, two publishers (Chikuma Shobo, Fuyukisha) have published full collection of poems. As for his novels, his daughter Asako Muro has edited and published "The Full Kingdom Story of Muro Saisei" (Sakuhinsha). He has never returned to his hometown Kanazawa after his success in Tokyo but always kept a picture of the River Sai. A monument honoring Shusei Tokuda was erected near the summit of Mount Utatsu in 1947. The monument features writing authored by Saisei and was designed by architect Yoshirō Taniguchi. (from Wikipedia)

Taiko Hirabayashi is the pen name of the award-winning Japanese author, Hirabayashi Tai. At the tender age of 12 Hirabayashi had already decided to become a writer. She also developed an early interest in socialism. She graduated from the Suwa Women's Highschool in 1922 and moved to Tokyo, where she would live with an anarchist Toshio Yamamoto. Together they moved to Korea but returned after only a month. Hirabayashi gave birth to a child in Manchuria in a hospital in Dalian but the child would only live for twenty-four days before dying of malnourishment. She would use this experience to write a semi-autobiographical short story Charity Hospital that would start off her career as a proletarian literature writer. In the year 1927 Hirabayashi would marry the novelist and literary critic Jinji Kobori, the marriage lasted 23 years before it ended by divorce in 1955. After the second world war Hirabayashi took to writing Tenko Literature (literature based on one's own political identity.) based on her conservative and anti-communist leanings. She was posthumously awarded the Nihon geijutsuin shou (日本芸術院賞) and the Hirabayashi Taiko Prize was created in her honour. There is a Hirabayashi Taiko Memorial Museum in Suwa City, Fukushima prefecture.

From Niigata, Sakaguchi (坂口安吾) was one of a group of young Japanese writers to rise to prominence in the years immediately following Japan's defeat in World War II. In 1946 he wrote his most famous essay, titled "Darakuron" ("On Decadence"), which examined the role of bushido during the war. It is widely argued that he saw postwar Japan as decadent, yet more truthful than a wartime Japan built on illusions like bushido. Ango was born in 1906, and was the 12th child of 13. He was born in the middle of a Japan perpetually at war. His father was the president of the Niigata Shinbun (Newspaper), a politician, and a poet. Ango wanted to be a writer at 16. He moved to Tokyo at 17, after hitting a teacher who caught him truanting. His father died from brain cancer the following year, leaving his family in massive debt. At 20, Ango taught for a year as a substitute teacher following secondary school. He became heavily involved in Buddhism and went to University to study Indian philosophy, graduating at the age of 25. Throughout his career as a student, Ango was very vocal in his opinions. He wrote various works of literature after graduating, receiving praise from writers such as Makino Shin’ichi. His literary career started around the same time as Japan’s expansion into Manchuria. He met his wife to be, Yada Tsuseko, at 27. His mother died when he was 37, in the middle of World War II. He struggled for recognition as a writer for years before finally finding it with “A Personal View of Japanese Culture” in 1942, and again with “On Decadence” in 1946. That same year, the Emperor formally declared himself a human being, not a god. Ango had a child at 48 with his second wife, Kaji Michio. He died from a brain aneurysm at age 48 in 1955.

Fumio Niwa (丹羽文雄 Niwa Fumio, born on November 22, 1904 in Mie Prefecture, Japan, died April 20, 2005 in Musashino, Tokyo) was a Japanese novelist with a long list of works, the most famous in the West being his novel The Buddha Tree (Japanese Bodaiju, 1956). The eldest son of a priest in the Pure Land sect of Buddhism, Niwa grew up at Sogenji, a temple in Yokkaichi near Nagoya. After his graduation from Waseda University, he reluctantly entered the hereditary priesthood at Sogenji but quit two years later, at the age of 29, in order to become a writer, walking out of the temple grounds on 10 April 1932 and heading back to Tokyo. He was supported by his girlfriend until his marriage in 1935. During this time he published Sweetfish (Japanese Ayu), serialised in Bungei Shinju, and the novel Superfluous Flesh (Japanese Zeiniku). Niwa's work was controversial and during World War II a couple of his novels were banned for immorality; he worked as a war correspondent in China and New Guinea; he accompanied Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa's Eighth Fleet and was on board the flagship Chōkai during the Battle of Savo Island on 9 August 1942. He was wounded at Tulagi. These experiences inspired Naval Engagement (Japanese Kaisen) and Lost Company (Kaeranu Chutai), both censored. After the war Niwa became the extremely prolific author of more than 80 novels, 100 volumes of short stories, and 10 volumes of essays. His most celebrated short story was The Hateful Age (Japanese Iyagarase no Nenrei, 1947), about a family terrorised by a senile grandmother, which became so famous that the phrase "the hateful age" entered the language for a time. The novel The Buddha Tree uses his unhappy childhood at Sogenji as a backdrop. When he was eight years old his mother eloped with an actor from the Kansai Kabuki company, an event that greatly traumatised him; in this novel the story is elaborated fictionally. Later works include, from 1969, a five-volume biography of Shinran (1173-1262), the founder of the Pure Land sect, and in 1983 an eight-volume work on Rennyo, a 15th Century monk who died on a pilgrimage to India. In 1965 Niwa was elected a member of the Art Academy of Japan, and the following year he was elected as the chief director of the Japanese Writers' Association, a position he held for many years. Niwa encouraged fellow members to play golf, organised health insurance, and bought land for a writers' graveyard. He was awarded the Order of Culture in 1977. (from Wikipedia)

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川 龍之介) was one of the first prewar Japanese writers to achieve a wide foreign readership, partly because of his technical virtuosity, partly because his work seemed to represent imaginative fiction as opposed to the mundane accounts of the I-novelists of the time, partly because of his brilliant joining of traditional material to a modern sensibility, and partly because of film director Kurosawa Akira's masterful adaptation of two of his short stories for the screen. Akutagawa was born in the Kyōbashi district Tokyo as the eldest son of a dairy operator named Shinbara Toshizō and his wife Fuku. He was named "Ryūnosuke" ("Dragon Offshoot") because he was born in the Year of the Dragon, in the Month of the Dragon, on the Day of the Dragon, and at the Hour of the Dragon (8 a.m.). Seven months after Akutagawa's birth, his mother went insane and he was adopted by her older brother, taking the Akutagawa family name. Despite the shadow this experience cast over Akutagawa's life, he benefited from the traditional literary atmosphere of his uncle's home, located in what had been the "downtown" section of Edo. At school Akutagawa was an outstanding student, excelling in the Chinese classics. He entered the First High School in 1910, striking up relationships with such classmates as Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, Yamamoto Yūzō, and Tsuchiya Bunmei. Immersing himself in Western literature, he increasingly came to look for meaning in art rather than in life. In 1913, he entered Tokyo Imperial University, majoring in English literature. The next year, Akutagawa and his former high school friends revived the journal Shinshichō (New Currents of Thought), publishing translations of William Butler Yeats and Anatole France along with original works of their own. Akutagawa published the story Rashōmon in the magazine Teikoku bungaku (Imperial Literature) in 1915. The story, which went largely unnoticed, grew out of the egoism Akutagawa confronted after experiencing disappointment in love. The same year, Akutagawa started going to the meetings held every Thursday at the house of Natsume Sōseki, and thereafter considered himself Sōseki's disciple. The lapsed Shinshichō was revived yet again in 1916, and Sōseki lavished praise on Akutagawa's story Hana (The Nose) when it appeared in the first issue of that magazine. After graduating from Tokyo University, Akutagawa earned a reputation as a highly skilled stylist whose stories reinterpreted classical works and historical incidents from a distinctly modern standpoint. His overriding themes became the ugliness of human egoism and the value of art, themes that received expression in a number of brilliant, tightly organized short stories conventionally categorized as Edo-mono (stories set in the Edo period), ōchō-mono (stories set in the Heian period), Kirishitan-mono (stories dealing with premodern Christians in Japan), and kaika-mono (stories of the early Meiji period). The Edo-mono include Gesaku zanmai (A Life Devoted to Gesaku, 1917) and Kareno-shō (Gleanings from a Withered Field, 1918); the ōchō-mono are perhaps best represented by Jigoku hen (Hell Screen, 1918); the Kirishitan-mono include Hokōnin no shi (The Death of a Christian, 1918), and kaika-mono include Butōkai(The Ball, 1920). Akutagawa married Tsukamoto Fumiko in 1918 and the following year left his post as English instructor at the naval academy in Yokosuka, becoming an employee of the Mainichi Shinbun. This period was a productive one, as has already been noted, and the success of stories like Mikan (Mandarin Oranges, 1919) and Aki (Autumn, 1920) prompted him to turn his attention increasingly to modern materials. This, along with the introspection occasioned by growing health and nervous problems, resulted in a series of autobiographically-based stories known as Yasukichi-mono, after the name of the main character. Works such as Daidōji Shinsuke no hansei(The Early Life of

Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成) was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read today. Nobel Lecture: 1968 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel\_prize...

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎) was a Japanese author, and one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, perhaps the most popular Japanese novelist after Natsume Sōseki. Some of his works present a rather shocking world of sexuality and destructive erotic obsessions; others, less sensational, subtly portray the dynamics of family life in the context of the rapid changes in 20th-century Japanese society. Frequently his stories are narrated in the context of a search for cultural identity in which constructions of "the West" and "Japanese tradition" are juxtaposed. The results are complex, ironic, demure, and provocative.

Yasushi Inoue (井上靖) was a Japanese writer whose range of genres included poetry, essays, short fiction, and novels. Inoue is famous for his serious historical fiction of ancient Japan and the Asian continent, including Wind and Waves, Tun-huang, and Confucius, but his work also included semi-autobiographical novels and short fiction of great humor, pathos, and wisdom like Shirobamba and Asunaro Monogatari, which depicted the setting of the author's own life—Japan of the early to mid twentieth century—in revealing perspective. 1936 Chiba Kameo Prize —- Ruten,流転 1950 Akutagawa Prize —- Tōgyu,闘牛 1957 Ministry of Education Prize for Literature —- The Roof Tile of Tempyo,天平の甍 1959 Mainichi Press Prize —- Tun-huang,敦煌 1963 Yomiuri Prize —- Fūtō,風濤 (from Wikipedia)

Mori Ōgai, pseudonym of Mori Rintarō (born February 17, 1862, Tsuwano, Japan—died July 9, 1922, Tokyo), one of the creators of modern Japanese literature. The son of a physician of the aristocratic warrior (samurai) class, Mori Ōgai studied medicine, at first in Tokyo and from 1884 to 1888 in Germany. In 1890 he published the story “Maihime” (“The Dancing Girl”), an account closely based on his own experience of an unhappy attachment between a German girl and a Japanese student in Berlin. It represented a marked departure from the impersonal fiction of preceding generations and initiated a vogue for autobiographical revelations among Japanese writers. Ōgai’s most popular novel, Gan (1911–13; part translation: The Wild Goose), is the story of the undeclared love of a moneylender’s mistress for a medical student who passes by her house each day. Ōgai also translated Hans Christian Andersen’s autobiographical novel Improvisatoren. In 1912 Ōgai was profoundly moved by the suicide of General Nogi Maresuke, following the death of the emperor Meiji, and he turned to historical fiction depicting the samurai code. The heroes of several works are warriors who, like General Nogi, commit suicide in order to follow their masters to the grave. Despite his early confessional writings, Ōgai came to share with his samurai heroes a reluctance to dwell on emotions. His detachment made his later works seem cold, but their strength and integrity were strikingly close to the samurai ideals he so admired.

Masuji Ibuse (井伏 鱒二) was a Japanese novelist. At Waseda University, Ibuse was greatly influenced by the works of Shakespeare and Basho; he was also an avid reader of French fiction and poetry. Ibuse went as far as to pawn a watch to try to understand the necessities of writers. In 1918 Ibuse met naturalist writer Iwano Homei. Homei's literature was appealing to Ibuse and would later influence some of Ibuse's literary works. Ibuse befriended student Aoki Nampachi in Waseda, Aoki was a mentor and a great influence in the writings of Ibuse, Aoki's influence can be found in The Carp, where Ibuse ideolizes Aoki's friendship and represents his feelings towards this friendship in a carp. Ibuse started writing his first essays in 1922, shortly after the death of Aoki. Ibuse often found inspiration in his loneliness and in his encounters with geishas, his first literary works where in the style of prose, he had severed ties with Waseda University and started writing for small magazines. One of Ibuse's first contributions was for the magazine Seiki, it was originally written for Aoki in 1919 and titled The Salamander, in 1923 it was renamed Confinement. Ibuse was known and appreciated for most of his career, although it wasn't until after the war that he became famous. In 1966 he published his most well known work, Black Rain, which won him international acclaim and several awards including the Noma Prize and the Order of Cultural Merit, the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a Japanese author. The novel draws its material from the bombing of Hiroshima with the title referring to the nuclear fallout. Ibuse was not present at the time of the bombing, but uses the diaries of survivors to construct his narrative. His earlier story Kakitsubata (The Crazy Iris, first published in 1951) deals with similar themes. (from Wikipedia)

Fumiko Hayashi (林 芙美子), December 31, 1903 or 1904 (Japanese sources disagree on the birth year) - June 28, 1951) was a Japanese novelist and poet. When Hayashi was seven, her mother ran away with a manager of her common-law husband's store, and afterwards the three worked in Kyūshū as itinerant merchants. After graduating from high school in 1922, Hayashi moved to Tokyo with a lover and lived with several men until settling into marriage with the painter Rokubin Tezuka (手塚 緑敏?) in 1926. Many of her works revolve around themes of free spirited women and troubled relationships. One of her best-known works is Hōrōki (translated into English as "Vagabond's Song" or "Vagabond's Diary") (放浪記, 1927), which was adapted into the anime Wandering Days. Another is her late novel Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1951), which was made into a movie by Mikio Naruse in 1955. Hayashi's work is notable as well for its feminist themes. She was later to face criticism for accepting sponsored-trips by the Japanese military government to occupied China, from where she reported positively on Japanese administration. Until the 1980s, "women's literature" (joryu bungaku) was considered a separate category from other modern Japanese literature. It was critically disparaged as popular but too sentimental. But Ericson's (1997) translations and analysis of the immensely popular Hōrōki and Suisen (Narcissus) suggest that Hayashi's appeal is rooted in the clarity with which she conveys the humanity not just of women, but also others on the underside of Japanese society.