Hiroyuki Itsuki

Hiroyuki Itsuki (Japanese: 五木 寛之, born September 30, 1932) is a Japanese novelist, essayist and lyricist, best known in Japan by his novel The Gate of Youth and in the English-speaking world by Tariki: Embracing Despair, Discovering Peace.

Hiroyuki Matsunobu (Japanese: 松延 寛之) was born in Yame District, Fukuoka Prefecture, in 1932. He spent his early childhood in Korea and returned to Fukuoka at the end of World War II.

In his middle and high school days, he loved reading the novels by the Russian authors, such as Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. In 1952, he enrolled himself in the Russian Literature Department of Waseda University, but did not complete college education due to financial difficulty.

After working in Tokyo as a coordinator and a lyricist for the radio programs about ten years, he married Reiko Oka, his college sweetheart and a medical doctor, in 1965, and moved to his wife's town of Kanazawa. He assumed his last name of Itsuki, as one of her wife's uncles did not have children.

In 1965, Itsuki traveled with his wife to the Soviet Union and Scandinavia, and published his novel "Good-bye to Moscow Hoodlums" (Japanese: さらばモスクワ愚連隊), for which he was awarded "Shosetu Gendai" magazine's new author prize. In 1967, he received the coveted Naoki Prize for "Look at the Pale-Faced Horse" (Japanese: ). His 1968 novel, "The Young Ones Will Aim to Walk in the Wilderness" (Japanese: ), about a Japanese trumpeter's adventure of jaz, sex and wine in Nakhotka, Moscow, Helsinki, Paris and Madrid, and its movie with the theme song by The Folk Crusaders (its lyrics by Itsuki) were a big hit among those who spend their youth in the late 1960s. In 1970, he moved to Yokohama.

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