Background
Morimura was born during the period between two world wars in a city called Kumagaya, located in Saitama Prefecture. Kumagaya is not a great city, today it has a population of around 200,000 people.
森 村 誠
Morimura was born during the period between two world wars in a city called Kumagaya, located in Saitama Prefecture. Kumagaya is not a great city, today it has a population of around 200,000 people.
Morimura’s childhood experience was marked by the World War II. One of the air raids during the war was the Kumagaya air raid, which occurred when he was only 12 years old.
He was a bookworm who had a great passion for reading and realized he wants to become a writer when he was little. Morimura went to the Commercial High School in Saitama and wanted to enroll at the Meiji University. However, he didn’t succeed so he found a job in a company that produced and traded auto parts. He managed to get accepted to Aoyama Gakuin University, where he studied English and American literature, graduating in 1958.
The time when Morimura finished college was the period of recession and it was very hard to find work in the media industry, so he was forced to find another job. For the next nine years (from 1958), Morimura worked in different hotels, where his knowledge of English served him greatly. His debut didn’t come until 1967 when he published “The Big City” (Daitokai), a corporate novel.
However, after advising with a friend who was also a writer, he quickly turned to mysteries, which is where he had great success. His first widely noticed work was High-Rise Blind Spot (Koso no shikaku), a suspense thriller for which he received the 1969 Edogawa Rampo Prize. In 1972 he was given the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for his novel The Anatomy of Corruption (Fushoko no Kozo) and he finally established his reputation with a Shomei trilogy that became a best-seller. The trilogy included books Proof of the Man, Proof of the Wild and Proof of Youth and was created on commission to serve as a foundation for a script for a movie series. The trilogy was published in 1976-77.
Morimura’s most controversial work was The Devil’s Gluttony, which was serialized in Japanese Communist Party’s newspaper Akahata in 1980.. This book discovered the monstrosities that the Imperial Japanese Army committed during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). This Unit 731 of the Imperial Army undertook lethal biological and chemical experimentation on humans and it is believed that more than 200,000 people died of their experiments. The Devil’s Gluttony was also published as a two-volume book in 1981-82 but it was soon discovered that the book consisted fabricated photographs. The publisher quickly withdrew the book but it was republished without the disputable photographs in 1983.
Some of Morimura’s works were translated into English, including his short story “Devil of a Boy”, which appeared in the anthology “"Ellery Queen's Japanese Golden Dozen: The Detective Story World in Japan", edited by Ellery Queen. His novel The Way of Villainy (Akudo) got him the Yoshikawa Eiji Award for Literature.
Morimura also published historical and nonfiction novels, and most recently his interest have been haiku photo essays. His works sold more than 100 million copies in Japan. He tried himself in acting and had a small roles in Ningen no shômei (1977), Yasei no shômei (1978) and Aoki Ôkami: chi hate umi tsukiru made(2007).
(First published in 1981, it is believed this is the most ...)
1981(This work brought Morimura the Edogawa Rampo Award in 1969)
Considering that the majority of people in Japan is Shintou, it is believed that Morimura's denomination is Shintou.
He published his most controversial work The Devil's Gluttony as a series in the Japanese Communist Party's newspaper.
Morimura firmly believes that a person should follow his dreams, regardless of the circumstances. He didn’t give up on a career in writing even when he was forced to work in a hotel for years because he couldn’t find a job in the media industry due to the recession.
Aside from being a master in writing mystery novel, Morimura wrote several historical and nonfictional novels, including the famous The Devil’s Gluttony. He researched the monstrosities done by the Imperial Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War and shared his discoveries with the public.
He is a member of the Mystery Writers of Japan society, from which he received an award in 1972 for his work The Anatomy of Corruption
Morimura is a smart and charismatic man who has a great passion for books, as well as writing.
Physical Characteristics: Based on his pictures, Morimura is a rather tall, skinny and charismatic man,
There is no reliable data regarding Morimura's family.