A deeply thoughtful author who writes about love, life and the human condition and is unique in being the only Japanese author to follow in his father's footsteps by winning the same major Japanese literary prize, the Naoki Prize. Initially, Kazufumi Shiraishi didn't believe that becoming an author was a career option. He worked for two decades as a journalist and editor at one of Japan's leading monthly magazines before making the daunting decision to follow his award-winning father and twin brother's examples. His first novel, Isshun no hikari (A Ray of Light), a tragic love story, instantly put him on the literary map when it was published in 2000, to great critical acclaim. Kazufumi's father, Ichiro Shiraishi, won the prestigious Naoki Prize after being nominated eight times; while Kazufumi won the prize on only his second nomination for Hokanaranu hito e (To an Incomparable Other), his fifteenth novel. In 2016, his first novel published in English, Me Against the World, by Dalkey Archive Press (first published in Japanese in 2008), was ranked by The Japan Times as one of the best ten books released in 2016.