Kajio Shinji (1947– ) is an award-winning Japanese author who came to science fiction and fantasy in an unusual way. While running his inherited string of gasoline-stand franchises, Kajio wrote stories on the side. For several decades, he managed this exquisite balancing act, until in 1984 he quit the gasoline-stand business to become a full-time writer. Kajio has won the Nihon SF Taisho Award and the Seiun Prize three times.
The film Yomigaeri, a supernatural mystery about the investigation of several unexplained cases of resurrected people, is based on his novel of the same name. He is also renowned as a master of humorous science fiction in Japan—often emulated but rarely equaled for delightfully imaginative and funny twists that season what are still, at their core, seriously thought-provoking tales. He cowrote the manga Omoide emanon with Kenji Tsuruta, who also illustrated the series. The manga is based on his short story of the same name. In 1991, he won the Nihon SF Taisho Award for his novel Salamander senmetsu. More recently, he has achieved mainstream bestseller status in Japan.
Kajio has been a part of the science fiction community since middle school, when he began participating in Shibano Takumi’s famous Uchujin fanzine. He also made his debut because of that publication, when Hayakawa’s SF Magazine reprinted his story “Pearls for Mia” in 1970. This beautiful and haunting love story remains a favorite of many readers in Japan today. However, he is best known for his Emanon cycle. In 1979, he released the first story in this popular series, establishing himself as a leader in the Japanese science fiction community and making Emanon a permanent feature of the literary landscape. Since then, Kajio has continued to add installments of the cycle, adapting it to cover a staggering range of themes and ideas, and it still captures new fans today.
His gently mind-expanding and strangely upbeat short story “Reiko’s Universe Box” first appeared in Japanese in 1981 and was subsequently published in English in the anthology Speculative Japan (2007).