Catch, The, And Other War Stories

Fumiko Hayashi (林 芙美子), December 31, 1903 or 1904 (Japanese sources disagree on the birth year) - June 28, 1951) was a Japanese novelist and poet. When Hayashi was seven, her mother ran away with a manager of her common-law husband's store, and afterwards the three worked in Kyūshū as itinerant merchants. After graduating from high school in 1922, Hayashi moved to Tokyo with a lover and lived with several men until settling into marriage with the painter Rokubin Tezuka in 1926. Many of...

Japanese novelist, short-story writer and essayist, born on 31 January 1935 in the village of Ōse (now part of Uchiko) in Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. He studied French literature at the University of Tokyo under Kazuo Watanabe, a scholar of Rabelais, and began publishing while still a student, winning the Akutagawa Prize in 1958 for the novella "Shiiku" ("The Catch"). The birth of his eldest son, Hikari, with a brain hernia in 1963 became a central and recurring subject of his fic...