One of Japan's best-known and most respected writers, Tsutsui has been known since his debut in 1960 for his witty, inventive novels and short stories spanning a number of genres, principally fantasy. He wrote Science Fiction in the 1960's and 1970's, but then moved into more experimental, surrealist fiction, giving up being published in book form in Japan temporarily in 1993 as a protest to politically correct protestations about some of his writing.
A thread that seems to run through everything he writes is human folly. Most of his characters suffer awful fates as a result of their own foolishness, which usually takes the form of greed, desire or vanity. His quirky imagination, his ability to construct new and striking realities, threaded with a dark-edged, menacing humour, make him a truly unique literary voice. He cites his influences as Darwin, Freud and the Marx Brothers, which in turn lead to a mixture of pathos, psychological insight and slapstick in his writing, shot through with Kafka-esque inventiveness.
Tsutsui has won many literary awards over his lengthy and prolific career, including both the Yomiuri Literary Prize and the prestigious Tanizaki Prize (similar to the Pulitzer), and many of his novels have been best sellers in Japan, in particular the 1990 novel Bungakubu Tadano Kyoju, a metafictional parody of recent trends in literary theory.
He is published in the UK by Alma Books:
SALMONELLA MEN ON PLANET PORNO (2006) is a collection of 13 short stories. With the exception of Don't Laugh (published in a collection of "Short Shorts" in 1975), all the stories were originally published in literary magazines: Bravo Herr Mozart in 1970, Rumours About Me and Bad For The Heart in 1972, The Dabba Dabba Tree, The Very Edge of Happiness and Commuter Army in 1973, Bear's Wood Main Line, Hello Hello Hello and Farmer Airlines in 1974, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno in 1977, The Last Smoker in 1987, and The World is Tilting in 1989.
HELL (2007) is a novel depicting the author's own quirky view of Hell as a place.
PAPRIKA - to be published Autumn 2008, is widely considered to be Tsutsui's masterpiece and is a novel exploring the possibility of the manipulation of people's dreams.
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