Hisaki Matsuura  (1954–)  is a professor of French literature at the University of Tokyo; he obtained his doctorate from the New Sorbonne University in Paris. A man of many talents, he made his name as a poet before going on to win a series of prizes as a critic. His writings include commentary on literature, film, and architecture as well as a critical biography of an ethnologist. He came to fiction relatively late, publishing his first collection of short stories, Mono no tawamure (The Jest of Things), in 1996. His favorite themes, as in the film noir-like Tomoe (Triangle), involve a man who has lost his position in society being lured into some kind of labyrinth where he is seduced by an irresistible woman and stripped of his identity. The 2000 Akutagawa Prize-winning novella Hana kutashi (A Flower-Spoiling Rain) is an example of this in microcosm. His novel Hantō (Peninsula) won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature in 2004. In 2011, Fukanō (Impossible), a series of linked short stories based on the premise that the writer Yukio Mishima survived a botched suicide and is still alive today, generated a great deal of discussion.