Yutaka Haniya


Yutaka Haniya was a noted Japanese author.

Biography

Haniya was born in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, to a samurai family named Hannya after the Hannya Shingyo. 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, became its Agriculture Director the following year, and was promptly arrested. While in the prison's hospital, he devoted himself to studying Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
After World War II, Haniya founded a little magazine entitled Kindai Bungaku which became very influential. In this role he discovered and published Kōbō Abe, who subsequently joined Haniya's avant-garde group Yoru no Kai.
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.

Selected works