Nobuo Kojima

Who was Nobuo Kojima?

Nobuo Kojima was a Japanese writer prominent in the postwar era. He is most readily associated with other writers of his generation, such as Shōtarō Yasuoka, who describe the effects of Japan's defeat in World War II on the country's psyche.

From an early age, Kojima read a wide variety of literature, both Japanese and Western, and such writers as Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoevsky had a strong influence on his work. In addition to his fiction, he had a long career as a professor of English literature at Meiji University in Tokyo, publishing criticism and making translations of many major American writers, including Dorothy Parker, Irwin Shaw, and Bernard Malamud.