Person

Higashiyama, Akira

1968

Akira Higashiyama is the Japanese pen name of Wang Zhenxu, who was born in Taiwan before moving with his family to Fukuoka Prefecture in Japan’s Kyushu Region at age five. Author of a number of Japanese-language novels, including prose and anime scripts. His very first novel, Turd on the Run, won the grand silver and reader’s choice awards as part of the Kono Mystery ga Sugoi! awards that were handed out by Japan’s Takarajimasha publishing house in 2002. In 2015 he won the Naoki Prize for the novel Ryu. In 2017 his Boku ga Koroshita Hito to Boku o Koroshita Hito (“The Ones I Killed and the Ones Who Killed Me”) took three major awards—the Oda Sakunosuke Prize, the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, and the Watanabe Junichi Literary Prize