Takehiro Irokawa

Takehiro Irokawa (Japanese色 川 武 大, Irokawa Takehiro; pen name :阿佐 田 哲 也, Asada Tetsuya, born March 28, 1929 in Tokyo, † 10 April 1989) was a Japanese writer.

Life

Irokawa was the son of a retired captain with 40 years, who ran a boarding house for military personnel. As Irokawa was born, his father was already 44 years old and lived without to engage in employment from his pension. Irokawa could not make friends with school and missing often in the primary school to instead view movies and visiting the music hall ( Yose ). In 1943 he was obliged to work in a munitions factory. Because of his participation in a substance classified as subversive newspaper he was expelled after the war the school and earned his living for several years as black market dealers, petty criminals and gamblers.

From the early 1950s Irokawa began to write under various pseudonyms. In 1961 he was awarded for Kuroi fu Chūōkōron the Young Investigator Award. This was followed by the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature (1977 for Ayashii raikyakubo ), the Naoki Prize ( 1978 Rikon ), the Kawabata Yasunari Prize for Literature ( 1982 Hyaku ) and the Yomiuri Prize for Literature ( 1988 Kyojin nikki ). His published under the pseudonym Tetsuya Asada novel Majan Hourouki was filmed by Makoto Wada in 1984.

Works (selection)

• Hyaku (百) " One hundred ," translated by Detlef Foljanty, in: Eiko Saito (ed.) "Explorations. 12 storytellers from Japan ", Berlin, folk and world, pp. 198-217