Shōtarō Yasuoka

Shōtarō Yasuoka (1920-2013) was a Japanese novelist born in Kōchi, Japan, who spent his youth moving between military posts as the son of an Imperial Army veterinary corpsman. Drafted in 1944, he served briefly overseas before developing spinal caries after the war, beginning his writing career while bedridden. He debuted in 1951 with "The Glass Slipper," won the Akutagawa Prize in 1953 for "Bad Company" and "A Melancholy Pleasure," and received numerous awards including the Noma Literary Prize, Yomiuri Prize, and Person of Cultural Merit in 2001 for his postwar fiction.