風の吹き抜ける部屋

by Nobuo Kojima

Tankobon Hardcover

Published February 1, 2015

About the author

Nobuo Kojima (小島 信夫 Kojima Nobuo?, February 28, 1915 - October 26, 2006) was a Japanese writer prominent in the postwar era. He is most readily associated with other writers of his generation, such as Shōtarō Yasuoka, who describe the effects of Japan's defeat in World War II on the country's psyche.

From an early age, Kojima read a wide variety of literature, both Japanese and Western, and such writers as Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoevsky had a strong influence on his work. In addition to his fiction, he had a long career as a professor of English literature at Meiji University in Tokyo, publishing criticism and making translations of many major American writers, including Dorothy Parker, Irwin Shaw, and Bernard Malamud.

(from Wikipedia)

Nobuo Kojima was born in Gifu Prefecture and started writing for private magazines while still in high school. He began teaching middle-school English after graduating from the University of Tokyo in English literature in 1941, but was drafted and sent to China a year later. Discharged in 1946, he resumed writing while also working as a high school and university instructor. Kojima won the Akutagawa Prize for "Amerikan sukuru" (American School) in 1955, and in 1957 he received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to travel to the United States and study the works of such American authors as Anderson, Faulkner and Saroyan. His own fiction ranges widely from the experimental to the allegorical and symbolic.