Ishikawa, Tatsuzo

Born July 2, 1905, in Akita Prefecture, Honshu. Japanese writer.

Ishikawa published a trilogy between 1935 and 1938 (Down-and-Outers, Southern Sea, and Voiceless People) depicting the fortunes of Japanese settlers in Brazil. The outstanding features of his works are the treatment of major social problems and a wide-ranging, realistic depiction of life. Ishikawa was a war correspondent; his novel Living Soldiers (1938), for which he was prosecuted by the government, showed the atrocities of the Japanese militarists in China. His most popular postwar novels are Not Without Hope (1947), about the moral decay in postwar Japan; Reeds in the Wind (1949–51; Russian translation, 1960), concerning the fate of the Japanese intelligentsia during and after the years of rampant militarism; and The Human Wall (1958; Russian translation, 1963), a voluminous social novel about the postwar generation.