Seicho Matsumoto

Matsumoto was born in the city of Kokura, now Kokura Kita ward, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka prefecture, Kyushu, in 1909. His real name was Kiyoharu Matsumoto before he adopted the pen name Seichō Matsumoto; "Seichō" is the Sino-Japanese reading of the characters of his given name. He was an only child. After graduating from elementary school, Seichō was hired at a utility company. As an adult he designed layouts for the Asahi Shimbun in Kyushu. His work in the advertising department was interrupted by serving in World War II as a medical corpsman. He spent much of the war in Korea before resuming work at the Asahi Shimbun after the war. He transferred to the Tokyo office in 1950.

Although Matsumoto attended neither secondary school nor university, he was well-educated. As a rebellious teenager, he read banned revolutionary texts as part of a political protest, which enraged Seichō's father, causing him to destroy his son's collection of literature. Matsumoto sought award-winning works of fiction and studied them. His official foray into literature occurred in 1950 when the magazine Shukan Asahi hosted a fiction contest. He submitted his short story "Saigō satsu" (Saigō's Currency) and placed third in the competition. Within six years he had retired from his post at the newspaper to pursue a full-time career as a writer. Matsumoto wrote short fiction while simultaneously producing multiple novels, at one point as many as five concurrently, in the form of magazine serials. Many of his crime stories debuted in periodicals, among them "Harikomi" (The Chase), in which a woman reunites with her fugitive lover while police close in on them.

For his literary accomplishments, Matsumoto received the Mystery Writers of Japan Prize, Kikuchi Kan Prize, and the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for Literature. In 1952 he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for "Aru 'Kokura-nikki' den" (The Legend of the Kokura-Diary).

As a lifelong activist, Matsumoto voiced both anti-American and anti-Japanese sentiments in some of his writings. For example at the height of the 1960 Anpo protests, Matsumoto tapped into the anti-American mood with his notorious work of "non-fiction" Black Fog over Japan (日本の黒い霧, Nihon no kuroi kiri), in which an enterprising detective uncovers a vast conspiracy by American secret agents that ties together many famous incidents and unsolved crimes of the postwar period. Likewise, many of Matsumoto's works of fiction and nonfiction revealed various aspects of home-grown corruption in the Japanese system. In 1968 he traveled to communist Cuba as a delegate of the World Cultural Congress and ventured to North Vietnam to meet with its president later that same year.

Matsumoto was also interested in archeology and ancient history. He made his ideas public in his fiction and in many essays. His interest extended to Northeast Asia, the Western Regions, and the Celts.