Japanese · 1907–1991
Inoue spent twenty years as an arts reporter for the Mainichi Shimbun in Osaka and did not publish serious fiction until he was forty-two, when The Hunting Gun and The Bullfight appeared within months of each other and the second won the Akutagawa Prize. He then produced fifty novels and hundreds of stories in four decades, much of it historical fiction set along the Silk Road — Tun-huang, Wind and Waves, The Blue Wolf — researched with a journalist's thoroughness and written in a style of extreme restraint. He served in China as a soldier in 1937 and was invalided home. He headed the Japan PEN Club, was made a Person of Cultural Merit, received the Order of Culture, and was a frequent Nobel candidate. Chronicle of My Mother, about his mother's dementia, is the book Japanese readers most often name as the one that broke them.