Tetsuya Ayukawa

Toru Nakagawa (February 14, 1919 – September 24, 2002), known by his pen name , was a Japanese literary critic and novelist. He is noted for his Detective Onitsura Series of mystery stories.

Biography Ayukawa was born in the Sugamo neighborhood of Tokyo. His father was a surveyor employed by the South Manchurian Railway. When Ayukawa was in the third year of elementary school, the family relocated to Dalian in the Kwantung Leased Territory where he completed middle school. He returned to Tokyo intending to enter a music conservatory, but was forced to return to Manchuria due to an attack of pleurisy. In 1938, he was admitted to the Takushoku University's School of Commerce, but his education was interrupted by frequent illness. During this time, he began reading detective novels, and was especially a fan of Freeman Wills Crofts, whose stories often had a railway theme, typically with an apparently unbreakable alibi focused on the intricacies of railway timetables. In 1944, due to his father's retirement, the family moved back to Tokyo, but was forced to evacuate to Kumamoto Prefecture to escape the Tokyo air raids of World War II. He is noted for his Detective Onitsura Series of mystery stories.

In 1972, he launched another mystery series, in which the protagonist is an amateur detective who is also a bartender in the Ginza district of Tokyo.

In 1990, the publisher Tokyo Sogensha established the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award, a literary award for new mystery authors.

In 2001, Ayukawa was awarded the Honkaku Mystery Award for Lifetime Achievement.

After his death in Kamakura 2002, he was posthumously awarded the Japan Mystery Literature Award.

Partial bibliography The Petrov Case, 1950 , 1956 The Black Swan Mystery, 1959; English translation by Bryan Karetnyk, 2025 , 1966