Tsutomu Minakami

Tsutomu Mizukami (水上 勉, Mizukami Tsutomu, March 8, 1919 – September 8, 2004), also known as Minakami Tsutomu, was a popular and prolific Japanese author of novels, detective stories, biographies, and plays. Many of his stories were made into movies.

Mizukami was born in Wakasa, Fukui Prefecture, to a poor family. Between the ages of 9 and 12, he was a novice in a Zen temple in Kyoto. Disillusioned by the conduct of the temple's chief priest, however, he left the temple in 1936.

Mizukami entered Ritsumeikan University to study Japanese literature, but dropped out for financial reasons and because of bad health. After World War II he learned from author Kōji Uno, and in 1952 wrote the autobiographical Furaipan no uta (Song of the Frying Pan), which became a best-seller. For nearly the next decade, however, he did not publish, but in 1960, his story centering on Minamata disease, Umi no kiba (The Ocean's Fangs), started his career as a writer of detective stories on social themes.

His autobiographic Gan no tera (Temple of the Geese) won the Naoki Prize in 1961, and was adapted for film by Kawashima Yūzō (1962). He followed this in 1962 with Kiga kaikyô (Starvation Straits, 1962) which was made into a film under the same name by Tomu Uchida (A Fugitive from the Past, 1965), and Kiri to kage (Fog and Shadows, 1963), then novels dealing with women's concerns, including Gobanchô Yûgiri-rô (The Pavilion of the Evening Mist at Gobanchô, 1963) and Echizen takeningyô (The Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, 1964).

He won the 1975 Tanizaki Prize for Ikkyū (一休), a biography of an eccentric Zen-master Ikkyū.

Selected works