Genichiro Takahashi
Life and career. Takahashi was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima prefecture and attended the Economics Department of Yokohama National University without graduating. As a radical student, he was arrested and spent half a year in prison, which caused Takahashi to develop a form of aphasia. As part of his rehabilitation, his doctors encouraged him to start writing. Critics have compared him to Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and Italo Calvino. Takahashi's first novel, "Sayonara, Gyangutachi" ("Sayonara, Gangsters"), was published in 1982, and won the Gunzo Literary Award for First Novels. It has been acclaimed by critics as one of  the most important works of postwar Japanese literature. It has been translated into English, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Czech. In addition, his "Yuga de kansho-teki na Nippon-yakyuu" ("Japanese Baseball: Elegant and Sentimental") won the Mishima Yukio Prize in 1988, and his "Nihon bungaku seisui shi" ("The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature") received the Itoh Sei Literature Award. Since April 2005, he has been a professor at the International Department of Meiji Gakuin University. Takahashi's current wife, Tanikawa Naoko and former wife Muroi Yuzuki were also both writers. In 2012, "Sayonara Christopher Robin" ("Goodbye, Christopher Robin