Arimasa Ōsawa (1956–)  is one of Japan’s leading writers of hard-boiled crime fiction. A voracious reader of mysteries and fiction by Raymond Chandler and others from the time he was in grade school, he began writing his own stories while in college. His literary debut came when he won the 1979 Shōsetsu Suiri New Writers Prize for Kanshō no machikado (Sentimental Streets). While he then began churning out a rapid succession of novels, his titles failed to sell very well, and for a time he took to calling himself the “perennial one-printing wonder.” Finally, in 1990, Shinjuku-zame (tr. Shinjuku Shark), featuring a police detective in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, took off and became a bestseller, leading him to turn it into a series. In 1993, Shinjuku-zame: Mugen ningyō (Shinjuku Shark: Poisoning Doll), the fourth book, won the Naoki Prize, firmly establishing him as a hitmaker. Pandora airando (Pandora Island) garnered the Shibata Renzaburō Award in 2004, and Umi to tsuki no meiro (A Maze of Sea and Moon) won the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for Literature in 2014. Ōsawa has also taken the Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize four times, for Kokoro de wa omosugiru (The Heart Is Too Heavy, 2001), Yamisaki annai-nin (Guide into Darkness, 2002), Shinjuku-zame 9: Ōkamibana (Shinjuku Shark 9: The Werewolf, 2006), and Shinjuku-zame 10: Kizuna kairō (Shinjuku Shark 10: Ties that Bind, 2010). Ōsawa and fellow blockbuster writers Miyuki Miyabe and Natsuhiko Kyōgoku jointly support and promote their writing activities through the Racoon Agency (formerly the Ōsawa Office).
www.osawa-office.co.jp/write/osawa.html