Kaoru Kitamura

(born December 28, 1949) is the pen name of , 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 , which has since been taken up by many other writers.

He made his literary debut in 1989, with the publication of , and has been writing prolifically since then. He won the 44th Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1991 for , the 6th Honkaku Mystery Award in 2006 for , 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 . His works have been adapted for film, television, and manga.

Selected bibliography

Year Japanese Title Series 1989 series 1990 Enshi-san series 1991 Enshi-san series 1992 Enshi-san series 1995 trilogy 1997 "Time and Man" trilogy 1998 Enshi-san series 2001 "Time and Man" trilogy 2003 series 2005 Becky-san series 2005 2009 Becky-san series