Mangetsu Hanamura - Overview

Mangetsu Hanamura (1955–) portrays sex, violence, and religion with fierce intensity. After graduating from middle school, he rode around the country on a motorcycle, supporting himself with various jobs until 1989 when he was awarded the Shōsetsu Subaru New Writers’ Award and his literary career took off. When Hanamura was a child, his father used to force him to read literary classics written in old-style Chinese characters while inflicting physical abuse on him. After his father's death, Hanamura's behavior grew increasingly problematic and at 11 he was put in a Catholic reformatory where he suffered a number of intense episodes, some of them sexual in nature. These grueling experiences combined to make Hanamura an "outlaw" writer.