Kemuri Ka Tsuchi Ka Kuimono (Smoke, Soil, or Food)
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Otaro Maijo—He won the Mephisto Award in 2001.
For those who ain't familiar with Mephisto Award, it's an award for unpublished fictional, especially mystery, with focus on innovation and originality, organized by Kodansha.The most famous Mephisto winners are:
NisiOisiN—For Zaregoto 1 (Author of Monogatari and Katanagatari)
Hiroshi Mori—For Subete ga F ni Naru (Author of The Sky Crawlers)He also penned 2 short anime as part of Hideaki Anno's Animator Expo. :
The Dragon Dentist
HummerHeadHis work in English:
Asura Girl (Haikasoru, 2014)
Drill Hole in the Brain (in Faust 1. Del Rey, 2008)
Kemuri Ka Tsuchi Ka Kuimono
This is the title that got him Mephisto prize!
Synopsis: (by Andrew Cunningham)
A brilliant ER surgeon gets a call telling him his mother's in the hospital, so he buys a Hanson album and hops a flight back home to Fukui, the Dakota of Japan. His mother was hit over the head by a crazy man, who is concocting some ludicrous puzzle, like something out of a cheap third rate mystery novel, and the surgeon's half-cocked quest to kick the "motherfucker's ass" (lots of English swearing riddled through the book) unearths a load of demons from his own family history. Probably the most complete of Majio's books, and also the least fun; the sort of book where you had to put it down and wait till you cool off a bit for fear of tearing pages out. Or maybe I just get worked up when I read.