Shūichi Yoshida (吉田 修一) was born in Nagasaki, and studied Business Administration at Hosei University. He won the Bungakukai Prize for New Writers in 1997 for his story "Saigo no Musuko", and the Akutagawa Prize in 2002 (the fifth time he'd been nominated for the prize) for "Park Life". In 2002 he also won the Yamamoto Prize for Parade, and for winning both literary and popular prizes Yoshida was seen as a crossover writer, like Amy Yamada or Masahiko Shimada. In 2003 he wrote lyrics for the song "Great Escape" on Tomoyasu Hotei's album Doberman. His 2007 novel Villain won the Osaragi Jiro Prize and the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award, and was recently adapted into an award-winning 2010 film by Lee Sang-il.
I started to read this book after watching the movie “Kokuho”, as I want to know much about background information. Information about each character is written very well in this book, and it is very easy to read through. I really enjoyed the way the author describes how beautiful their dance was.
Amazing story about kabuki Drawn lots of interest for me to Japanese culture The author is so smart using kabuki and japanese gangsters as the centre of the story. Both are intriguing topics and colorful backgrounds itself