Kaoru Kitamura (北村 薫) (born December 28, 1949) is the pen name of Kazuo Miyamoto (宮本 和男), a popular contemporary Japanese writer, mainly of short stories.

Biography

Kitamura was born in the town of Sugito in Saitama Prefecture. He studied literature at Waseda University in Tokyo, and was a member of the Waseda Mystery Club while a student there. However, after graduating from Waseda in 1972, he returned to Saitama to become a language teacher at Kasukabe High School, his alma mater. He began his fiction writing career only after teaching for almost twenty years, and stopped teaching in 1993 to devote himself completely to writing once established as an author. He made his writing debut using a pen name. Initially, because the unnamed first-person protagonist of his early works was a female college student, and the name Kaoru is gender ambiguous, it was widely speculated that Kitamura was female. This speculation persisted until he revealed his identity upon accepting the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1991.

Works

Kitamura is known as a writer of mysteries, and rather than the detective and crime stories of traditional mystery, his work mainly focuses on the logical resolution of more "ordinary" puzzles and questions encountered in everyday life. He is considered a pioneer of this style of mystery in Japan, called "everyday mystery" (日常の謎), which has since been taken up by many other writers. He made his literary debut in 1989, with the publication of "Flying Horse" (空飛ぶ馬), and has been writing prolifically since then. He won the 44th Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1991 for "Night Locusts" (夜の蝉), the 6th Honkaku Mystery Award in 2006 for "Japanese Coin Mystery" (ニッポン硬貨の謎), and the 2006 Baka-Misu Award for the same work. In 2009, after repeated previous nominations, he won the prestigious Naoki Prize (the 141st) for "Herons and Snow" (鷺と雪). His works have been adapted for film, television, and manga.

Selected bibliography