A Caring Man

In a time when the world is obsessed with international terror, Akira Arai introduces readers to a homegrown element that may be capable of unleashing unimaginable horrors. In 1991 by public demand rural Miyazaki Prefecture, southern Japan, inaugurated their first "Stork's Cradle" (baby hatch/baby drop-box) in a public hospital, and its first client was a newborn boy. The abandoned child was in such a horrbile state, mangled from head-to-toe and clearly malnurished, that the hospital staff took pity on the child. A particularly sympathetic nurse vowed to raise the child to full and proper health, while the hospital's president named the boy after his hosptial, Iizuka, calling him Yoshio (a caring man). Yoshio Iizuka quickly grew to become a level-headed, well-rounded intelligent teen. At 15, self-reliant he left quiet Miyazaki for the big city, Tokyo. Now under the care of the Akabane-Negibasi Orphanage in Northern Tokyo, Yoshio appeared to be in amazing shape and those who recorded his growth progress felt that while his physical body might show other wise the young man could not have a single cell in his body that is still lingering from its tragic beginnings. However, on the night of his fifteenth birthday something inside of Yoshio triggered a shocking act. Yoshio had come to plot out and eventually commit the violent stabbing of a young man. While he was never convicted of the crime, there was a clear an evident change in him as his drive would begin to intensify in the coming years. Yoshio, now nineteen, is now running a non-for profit organization defending abused youth. Putting his life on the line for people who have experienced life's autrocities...and it's all a cover! A front to earn money for the next major attack on society--a series of timed explosions around Japan's capital Tokyo.

Akira Arai is an author and journalist currently based out of the trendy, almost bohemian, neighborhood of Shimokitazawa in western Tokyo. A regular columnist for KERSOL Magazine, Mr. Arai writes with a focus on the modern arts and film.

Better known around the globe as film producer and writer Seiichi Tsukuda. As an early player in the Saison Group's cinema expansion in the early 80's, Arai went on to develop and open a number of movie theaters in the greater Tokyo area. He then went on to launch Japanese film studio Kinetique in 1995. As a Kinetique producer Arai funded motion picture films such as Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 (1998) and Brown Bunny (2003), Bill Murray and Sharon Stone's Broken Flowers (2006) as well as the indie animated feature TAMALA 2010 (2002).

To this day Arai splits his time evenly doing film and prose. In 2007 he produced an indie film shot primarily in the narrow arcade shopping center within his Shimokitazawa neighborood.

A Caring Man is his first book in more than 15 years and it won the 2009 Golden Elephant Award for Interantional Genre Fiction.