Yasushi Inoue

Yasushi Inoue (Asahikawa, 1907 – Tokyo, 1991) was a Japanese writer of novels, short stories, poetry and essays. He belonged to the generation that lived through the war and its aftermath, and he matters because he renewed Japanese historical fiction and wrote frankly about his own family.

He was born in Hokkaido into a family of doctors, but he spent his childhood in Shizuoka Prefecture, where he was raised by his grandmother, a former geisha. That double origin troubled him for most of his life, to the point that he came to regard Izu as his true home. In his teens he practised judo intensely and, after failing the medical school entrance examination, he studied aesthetics and philosophy at Kyoto, graduating in 1936 with a thesis on Paul Valéry. He then worked as a journalist for the Mainichi group and served as a soldier in northern China, an experience that sparked his interest in Chinese history.

After the war, his novella The Bullfight earned him the Akutagawa Prize in 1949, and in 1951 he moved to Tokyo to devote himself fully to writing. His output is varied: contemporary love stories, tales of postwar Japan, carefully researched historical novels such as Tun-huang, and autobiographical works such as Chronicle of My Mother, in which he restrainedly records his mother's decline into senility. His prose tends to be spare, with a measured rhythm and close attention to period detail.

He held positions in literary institutions, including the presidency of the Japan Writers' Association from 1969 to 1972, and joined the Japan Art Academy in 1964. In 1976 he received the Order of Culture. Today he is remembered above all as a chronicler of Japan's past and of its long relationship with China, and his historical novels remain an accessible entry point into a history little known outside Asia.