Haniya was born in
Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, to a
samurai family named Hannya after the
Hannya Shingyo (
Heart Sutra). He had a sickly childhood and suffered from
tuberculosis in his teens. Although originally interested in
anarchism, in 1931 he joined the
Japanese Communist Party, becoming its Agriculture Director the following year, whereupon he was promptly arrested and imprisoned. While in the prison's hospital, he devoted himself to studying
Immanuel Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason. In 1933, Haniya underwent a coerced "ideological conversion" (
tenkо̄), after which he was allowed to leave prison and return to society. During the war years, he eked out a meager living as the editor of a small magazine on economics and a freelance translator. Haniya's novel was bitterly critical of the
Japan Communist Party (JCP) and the
Communist International under Soviet Premier
Joseph Stalin, which Haniya viewed as capricious and cruel. After
World War II, when the Japan Communist Party was legalized under the
U.S.-led Occupation of Japan, many of Haniya's old comrades rejoined the party, but Haniya did not. Haniya was a prolific writer; after his death,
Kodansha published his complete works in a set of 19 volumes. He won the 6th
Tanizaki Prize in 1970 for his collection
Black Horses in the Darkness and Other Stories. When Haniya died in 1997, he was still working on his novel
Departed Souls, which by that time extended to over 9,000 pages in length. == Selected works ==