As a cosmopolitan man of letters, Inoue Yasushi established a reputation as a poet, journalist, and fiction writer, although he is best known as a novelist. He was a major introducer and interpreter of the Silk Road phenomenon in Japan, and as president of the Japan P.E.N. Club and vice president of the International P.E.N. Club he represented Japanese writers worldwide. He was a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, yet he has written middlebrow entertainment set in contemporary Japan, serious fiction set in central Asia and China, and historical fiction set in the past of Japan. His work has been characterized as being both romantic and nihilistic in its view of man's endeavors and achievements throughout history.

Inoue was born on 6 May 1907 in Ishikari on central Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, where his father, an army doctor, was stationed. For generations...