Yuki Tanaka
Dystopian, Erotic
Words found me in the spaces between midnight street lamps and vending machine hums. Tokyo, 1989: I was that kid who wrote stories on the backs of convenience store receipts, who filled margins with haiku while my father taught me to slice fish at our restaurant. The restaurant failed. The stories didn't. My first published piece was graffiti – a poem scratched into a bathroom wall at Kyoto University, where I was supposedly studying economics. Someone photographed it, posted it online, and suddenly my words had wings. Underground literary magazines came calling. I answered. These days, they call me "the ghost writer" – not because I write under pseudonyms (though I have seven), but because I chronicle the stories of abandoned places. I spend months living in dying towns, forgotten hot spring resorts, and shuttered schools. My best story (though not the most popular) was written entirely from an empty shopping arcade in Hokkaido, where I slept on a futon between dusty pachinko machines and interviewed the elderly owners who still opened their shops each morning, despite having no customers.
