Natsuo Kirino

(born October 7, 1951, in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture) is the pen name of Mariko Hashioka, a Japanese novelist and a leading figure in the recent boom of female writers of Japanese detective fiction. Biography Kirino is the middle child of three. She has two brothers, one who is six years older and one who is five years younger. Her father was an architect. Kirino has lived in many different cities, including her current residence, Tokyo. Kirino married in 1975 and had a daughter in 1981. She earned a law degree in 1974 from Seikei University, and she dabbled in many fields of work before settling on being a writer. For example, not knowing what she wanted to do in life, Kirino began working at the Iwanami Hall movie theater in her early twenties. She soon discovered it wasn't right for her and just before her thirtieth birthday she started taking scriptwriting classes. It wasn't until she was in her thirties that she began to seriously think about becoming a writer, and it wasn't until her forties that she became popular as a writer. Literary career Kirino began her writing career in 1984, when she started composing novels in the romantic genre. However, these types of novels were not popular in Japan, so she found it difficult to make a living while writing them. She also did not have a passion for writing romance novels and wanted to concentrate on works focusing on the psychological aspect of crimes. She then turned her focus towards writing mystery novels in the early 1990s. To date, she has written several short story collections and many novels, and is now one of Japan's most popular writers.