Taku Mayumura


Taku Mayumura was a Japanese novelist, science fiction writer and haiku poet. He won the Seiun Award for Novel twice. In 2004 his Shiseikan, written in 1974, was translated into English. Mayumura was also a young adult fiction writer whose works have been adapted into TV drama, film, and anime. Mayumura was an honorary member of the SFWJ.

Biography

Mayumura was born as Murakami Takuji, at Osaka city, Osaka prefecture in 1934. He graduated from Osaka University in 1957 with a degree in economics, as well as a judo competition career at the Nanatei league. After graduation, he joined a company. While working at this company, he wrote short novels and submitted them to contests in commercial literary magazines.
In 1960, he joined the SF fanzine Uchūjin. In 1961, he won the Best Story prize in the 1st Kūsō-Kagaku Shōsetsu Contest for his novel Kakyū Aidea-man and made debut in the S-F Magazine by this work.
In 1965, he retired from the company and started working as an independent writer. Mayumura's first book, the SF novel Moeru Keisha, was published by Tōto Shobo in the same year. In 1979, he won the seventh Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature and the Seiun Award for his novel Shōmetsu no Kōrin, which is the representative work in his "Shiseikan series". In 1996, he won his second Seiun Award for another entry in the Shiseikan series, the long novel Hikishio no Toki.
As a literary theorist, he advocated the "Insider Bungaku-ron". Consistent with this theme, his novels frequently tackle the issues of problematic relations between individuals and the corporate or bureaucratic organizations to which they belong.
Mayumura was also a well-known young adult fiction writer. His representative works in this field were Nazo no Tenkousei and Nerawareta Gakuen etc. These works were adapted into TV Drama series by NHK, and adapted into Cinema too. Other juvenile fictions by Mayumura were adapted into the anime .
In 2002, his wife died of cancer. Mayumura had been writing a very short story every day for his wife, who was in the hospital bedridden since the cancer had been diagnosed. When his stories, which were written each day and numbered, reached to 1778, his wife died. These stories were compiled and published. The film Boku to Tsuma no 1778 no Monogatari, based on this true story, was filmed in 2009 and released in 2011.
As of 2008, Mayumura was a professor of the Graduate School of Osaka University of Arts.
He died early in the morning of November 3, 2019 due to aspiration pneumonia.

Haiku poetry

Mayumura was also a haiku poet. He was a member of the haiku club in his high school. He posted his haiku work to the haiku coterie magazine Ashibu which Shūōshi Mizuhara presided over. Mayumura has been a coterie membera of the haiku magazine "Uzu". In 2009, he published a Haiku book "Kiri wo yuku".

Style of Works

Mayumura wrote various stories. His stages of the fictions range from the ordinary life scenes of common people to the fantastic worlds hidden back in the daily life, to the inter-stellar federation of far future.
Especially, strange and fantastic aspects of the reality, adjacent to the ordinary life are the essence of his fantastic stories.

Awards

Novels

The Shiseikan series is summarized as follows: In the distant future, the humans of Earth constitute the Terrestrial Federation; the Terrestrial humans have spread far across outer space and colonized numerous planets and solar systems. The Federation established local governments on those planets to establish law and order among the human settlers, and to mediate between Terrestrials and the sapient aliens who had been originally born, evolved and lived on certain of these planets before the settlers arrived. In the early period, the planets had been ruled by Federation-aligned military juntas; however, the Federation has begun to recall the military administrations and send civilian administrators to govern on their behalf. The troubles faced by these administrators constitute the stories of Shiseikan.