Japanese · 1898–1993
Ibuse came from a landowning family in Hiroshima prefecture, studied French literature and painting, and made his name in 1929 with a story about a salamander that grows too big to leave its rock. He wrote quietly and comically for decades about country people and misfits, was drafted as a propaganda writer in Singapore during the war, and disliked being called a war writer afterwards. He mentored Osamu Dazai, whose funeral he attended, and whose chaos he survived by thirty-five years. Black Rain, serialised in 1965 and 1966, was built from the diaries and testimony of Hiroshima survivors, assembled with the same flat attention he had given to fishing villages and eccentric neighbours. It won the Noma Prize and the Order of Cultural Merit and became the standard literary account of the bomb. He was ninety-five when he died.