Sosuke Natsukawa

Sosuke Natsukawa is a Japanese physician and novelist, born in Osaka Prefecture in 1978. He graduated from the school of medicine at Shinshu University and practises in the largely rural prefecture of Nagano.

His debut, Kamisama no Karute (God's Medical Records, 2009), won the Shogakukan Bunko Novel Prize, placed second in the Booksellers' Award and has sold more than three million copies in Japan.

The Cat Who Saved Books (2017), in which a boy and a talking tabby cat set out to rescue neglected books, was his first novel translated into English, in a 2021 translation by Louise Heal Kawai; a sequel, The Cat Who Saved the Library, followed. His later novel Spinoza's Consulting Room (2023) won the Kyoto Book Prize.

Sosuke Natsukawa is a pen name, assembled from the names of Natsume Sōseki, Yasunari Kawabata and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.