Akiyuki Nosaka

Akiyuki Nosaka (野坂 昭如 Nosaka Akiyuki; Kamakura, October 10, 1930 – Tokyo, December 9, 2015) was a Japanese novelist and singer, member of the House of Councilors of Japan. He wrote under the pseudonym Yukio Aki and sang using the name Claude Nosaka.

Biography

He was born on October 10, 5 Shōwa (1930), in the city of Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture.

Adopted by a family from Kobe, he spent his childhood in that city, which was severely bombed during World War II, causing the disruption of the adoptive family, so Nosaka had to spend a couple of years in an orphanage. The experience of said bombing, as well as the misery experienced during the last days of the war and the period that followed was fundamental in his work, and which he reflects in The Grave of the Fireflies . It seems that in a bombing of Kobe by North American aviation, fleeing from the incendiary bombs, he loses his adoptive mother, who will end up dying, so he must take care of his four-year-old little sister. After wandering through the remains of a burned city, unfortunately his sister also dies of starvation, in which the disorientation of the Japanese in the face of the loss of the world in which they had lived as a culture and as a society is also emphasized, in a similar vein. to that developed by Yukio Mishima. His adoptive father fought in World War II and his adoptive mother had health problems since her daughter was born.

His first novel, The Pornographers, was published in 1963, and made him famous within his country, but it was not until The Grave of the Fireflies (Cliff, 2000) (Hotaru no haka, of which there is an animated film version, directed by Isao Takahata, which in turn is inspired by autobiographical events) and American Seaweed (Hijiki America), a pair of short novels with autobiographical overtones that earned him the Naoki award in his homeland, in 1968, which began to stand out internationally.

In 1983 he entered the House of Councilors of Japan. In 2003 he suffered a stroke, which affected him until his death in 2015.