Masahiko Shimada

Masahiko Shimada was born in Tokyo in 1961. He began writing fiction while studying Russian at university and, while still an undergraduate, gained the first of six nominations throughout his career for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Shimada’s prolific and experimental oeuvre includes the novels Music for a Sonambulant Kingdom (1984, winner of the Noma New Writer’s Award and translated into English by Philip Gabriel), Higan Sensei (1992, a parody of Sōseki Natsume’s classic novel Kokoro that won the Izumi Kyōka Prize), and essays and plays inspired by Poe and Dante.