User:Wikianonwikianon/Yūjin Koyama

Yūjin Koyama (小山 右人), born May 13, 1949, in Niigata, Japan, is a Japanese writer, painter, and physician. In 1996, he made his debut as a writer and won the Shinchō Newcomer Award. He primarily writes short stories. He is also a painter of fantasy paintings that blend Western and Japanese creative styles.

Biography
In 1969, Koyama entered the Tokyo Medical and Dental University to study medicine. School disputes and student unrest during the 1968-1969 academic year had led to the cancelation of the entrance examination for the University of Tokyo for the first time in the institution’s history.

In 1975, Koyama began his studies of urology and training in the surgical treatment of malignant tumors of the urinary system. As he gradually came into contact with new ideas such as French structuralism, he developed a strong interest in psychopathological research. In 1987, he obtained his doctorate and began working as a psychiatrist specializing in expressive psychopathology.

In 1973, Koyama won the Mainichi Shimbun’s All-Japan Student Oil Painting Contest and was featured in that newspaper. While he was in his third year of medical school, two of his works were selected for exhibition in Room 1 of the New Production Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno. He held a solo exhibition at the Galerie Sainte-Anne in Paris in 1978, followed by an exhibition at the Nice Festival in 1984. In 2010, he participated in a group exhibition at the Maison des arts in Vaison-la-Romaine. In 2014, he exhibited a series of videos at the International Museum of Glass in Abano Terme in Italy. His short stories have been published in France since 2013, and several have been translated into French, Spanish, and English.

Literary Style
By 1970, with the continued unrest having disillusioned his college life, Koyama was welcomed into a private painting school run by Isao Takasugi. When Takasugi discovered the young man’s artistic individuality, he recommended that Koyama pursue his passion for painting, though Koyama did not fully abandon the path of medicine. After Koyama began a detailed study of human anatomy at the medical school in 1972, he repeatedly had nightmares of an old corpse’s face, but he eventually overcame them by painting the face in a fantastical style. Because of this incident, he gradually developed his talent as a painter as well as his descriptive prose as a writer and began to write short stories.

He continued to paint and write for the rest of his life, often drawing pictures based on his own stories. Recurring themes in his works include fantastical atmospheres, outbursts of emotions while dreaming, and characters tormented by nightmares of illness, often in almost supernatural situations. Evocative of Noh and other traditional Japanese arts, his writing style tends to incorporate understated humor and poetic elements.