Kita Morio is one of the relatively few Japanese writers whose diverse works have combined styles distinguished by deferential humor or high moral seriousness with shrewd psychological insights and social observation. At least two of his works, his early novel Yurei (1954; translated as Ghosts, 1992) and his lengthy and moving Nireke no hitobito (1962--1964; translated as The House of Nire [1984] and as The Fall of the House of Nire [1985]), are generally considered among the more impressive accomplishments of postwar Japanese literature.

Kita was born as Sait Mungkichi on 1 May 1927, the second son of Sait Mokichi, who had studied psychopathology in Germany and Austria from 1921 until 1925 and then returned to Tokyo to run a well-known hospital and clinic for mental patients. Along with his clinical duties Mokichi had maintained a second career as a writer and poet, and his literary experiments in modernizing the traditional thirty-one-syllable waka form had made...