Born in
Los Angeles, he accompanied his family back to Japan before he was three years old. He attended
Waseda University and worked for a while as a journalist after graduating in 1988. He spent the better part of the years 1990-5 living in
Mexico before returning to Japan, where for a time he worked translating from Spanish-language movies into
Japanese. In 1997 he published his first
novel The Last Gasp, for which he was awarded the
Bungei Prize. He won the 13th
Yukio Mishima Prize for his second novel
The Mermaid Sings Wake Up, which was published in 2000. He won the
Noma Literary New Face Prize for
Fantasista in 2003. Other works include
The Poisoned Singles Hot Springs (2002),
Naburiai (2003),
Lonely Hearts Killer (2004),
Alkaloid Lovers (2005),
The Worussian-Japanese Tragedy (2006),
The Story of Rainbow and Chloe (2006), and the collection
We the Children of Cats (2006). His short story "Sand Planet" was nominated for the
Akutagawa Prize for 2002. He has published many short stories and essays, both fiction and non-fiction. He also writes guest commentaries for newspapers and journals on sports (especially soccer),
Latin America, politics,
nationalism, and the arts. His short story "Chino" has been translated into English by Lucy Fraser, and is now part of his short story collection "We, the Children of Cats" (2012), published by
PM Press and otherwise translated by Brian Bergstrom; his novel
Lonely Hearts Killer has been translated into English by
Adrienne Hurley and likewise published by PM Press. Hoshino travels frequently and has participated in writers' caravans with authors from
Taiwan, India, and elsewhere. In 2006, his critique of
Ichiro Suzuki's remarks at the
World Baseball Classic were considered controversial by some, and so have some of his other writings related to
Japanese nationalism, the
emperor,
sexuality,
bullying, and
Japanese society. Also in 2006, the literary journal Bungei dedicated a special issue to Hoshino and his work. He teaches
creative writing at Waseda, his alma mater. In January 2007, he was nominated again for the
Akutagawa Prize, this time for . In 2011, Hoshino won the
Kenzaburō Ōe Prize for his novel
Ore Ore (2010), which explores the meaning of
identity in the
postmodern world. The title takes its name from the first-person Japanese pronoun . Early in the novel, the narrator engages in a kind of scam known in Japan as a , in which he calls up an older person, pretends to be a relative, and tries to get the person on the other end of the phone line to send money. In the novel, the narrator finds himself unwittingly pulled into the life of the person whose identity he has fraudulently assumed, at the same time that someone else assumes his identity. This starts a chain-reaction of identity-stealing that extends to the edges of society, creating an increasingly surreal and dangerous world in which no one is exactly who they seem. The novel has been translated as
ME by Charles De Wolf for Akashic Books. In 2014 Hoshino won the
Yomiuri Prize for ''
, a novel based on One Thousand and One Nights'' that shifts narrative voice to misdirect the reader. In 2018 he won the
Tanizaki Prize for . ==Bibliography==