Yoshinaga Fujita  (1950–)  left university before graduating and lived with a French woman he met in Tokyo, a relationship that took him to Paris in 1973. There he found work with Air France while doing translation on the side. Encouraged by the author and detective-fiction critic Kiyoshi Kasai to try his hand at writing, he made his authorial debut in 1986 with Yabo no rabirinsu (Labyrinth of Ambition), a whodunit set in Paris. In 1994 his novel Kotetsu no kishi (Knight of Steel) won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award and a special award from the Japan Adventure Fiction Association. His 1997 Juka no omoi (Reflections Under a Tree) staked out new territory for him as a romance author, and he has produced numerous novels in this genre since then. Fujita is married to the writer Mariko Koike; Ai no ryobun (Un coin d'amour) won him the Naoki Prize six years after Koike received the award in 1995. They are the only couple to have both garnered the Naoki.