Keizo Hino
Biography
Keizo Hino was born in Tokyo in 1929. The family went to Korea when it was still under Japanese rule. After the war, he returned to Japan and graduated from the University of Tokyo, graduating in sociology, and became a journalist. He served as a foreign correspondent in South Korea and in Vietnam during the Vietnam war. After returning from Vietnam, he took up fiction writing at a relatively late age (he was in his forties). His earlier novels were concerned with the physical environment but after having kidney cancer and a kidney transplant when he was sixty-one, his novels became more introspective. He died in 2002 of colon cancer.