Yutaka Haniya

was a Japanese writer and critic.

Biography Haniya was born in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, to a samurai family named Hannya after the Hannya Shingyo (Heart Sutra). He had a sickly childhood and suffered from tuberculosis in his teens. Although originally interested in anarchism, in 1931 he joined the Japanese Communist Party, becoming its Agriculture Director the following year, whereupon he was promptly arrested and imprisoned. While in the prison's hospital, he devoted himself to studying Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

In 1933, Haniya underwent a coerced "ideological conversion" (tenkо̄), after which he was allowed to leave prison and return to society. During the war years, he eked out a meager living as the editor of a small magazine on economics and a freelance translator. Haniya's novel was bitterly critical of the Japan Communist Party (JCP) and the Communist International under Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, which Haniya viewed as capricious and cruel.

After World War II, when the Japan Communist Party was legalized under the U.S.-led Occupation of Japan, many of Haniya's old comrades rejoined the party, but Haniya did not.

Haniya was a prolific writer; after his death, Kodansha published his complete works in a set of 19 volumes. He won the 6th Tanizaki Prize in 1970 for his collection Black Horses in the Darkness and Other Stories. When Haniya died in 1997, he was still working on his novel Departed Souls, which by that time extended to over 9,000 pages in length.

Selected works Departed Souls, (Shirei, 死靈), 1933-1997 (first published beginning in 1946) Black Horses in the Darkness and Other Stories, (Yami no naka no kuroi uma, 闇のなかの黒い馬), 1970