Seiichi Morimura, the celebrated Japanese mystery writer whose nonfiction trilogy “The Devil’s Gluttony” laid bare the horrific human experiments conducted by Japan’s Unit 731 during World War II, has died. He was 90.
According to his official website and publisher Kadokawa, Morimura died of pneumonia at a hospital in Tokyo on Monday. His work, which began as a newspaper series in 1981, became a bestseller and sparked nationwide debate over the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army’s secret biological warfare unit.
Unit 731, based in Japanese-occupied Harbin, China, is known to have injected prisoners with typhus, cholera and other diseases as part of germ warfare research. Historians and former unit members also report that the unit performed vivisections and froze prisoners to death in endurance tests.
Born in 1933 in Saitama, north of Tokyo, Morimura survived the intense US bombing of the Tokyo area near the end of the war, which instilled in him a deep pacifist commitment. He later wrote in defence of Japan’s postwar pacifist constitution and opposed nuclear weapons, joining protests against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 2015 reinterpretation of the constitution to allow greater military activity.
Morimura began his writing career contributing articles to magazines while working in hotels. He won the prestigious Edogawa Rampo Prize for mystery fiction in 1969 and the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1973. His 1976 novel “Ningen no Shomei” (“Proof of the Man”), a mystery about a murdered young Black man that exposed the dark side of postwar Japan, was adapted into a film. A year later, he published “Yasei no Shomei” (“Proof of the Wild”), a novel depicting a conspiracy over genocide in a remote village.
