The Frozen Sun

“The sky had a thin layer of cloud. A hazy orb shone in one corner. The afternoon sun, frozen in the sky, as cold as the moon...” 

Kohjo Koh’s stories of night club hostesses, yakuza, pan-pan girls and private-eyes, reveal a post-war Japan still reeling from defeat, told in a deadpan style echoing Hemingway and Hammett.

Translated for the first time into English there are ten stories in this collection:

Near X Bridge

Inferno

Cold Rain

To the Lone Prairie

La Cucaracha

The Bet

The Frozen Sun

Father and Sons

Drawing a Cross in the Sand

Distant Days in a Far Off Land

Kohjo Koh was born in Hakodate, Hokkaido in 1935, moving to Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, aged five. After evacuating north he returned to Sendai at the end of the war and began reading the paperbacks Allied soldiers left in secondhand bookshops, as well as those obtained by his English teacher father. When still a student at Tohoku University’s Faculty of Letters (where he was a member of the fencing team) Kohjo Koh’s short story “Near X Bridge” - now considered a pioneering work of Japanese hardboiled fiction - won “Jewel” magazine’s 1955 newcomer award. Following his graduation (the subject of his thesis was Ernest Hemingway) he continued to produce short stories and a novel while working for the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper. In the 1970s his output ceased but he returned to writing in 2006 with the publication of “Kohjo Koh’s Hardboiled Masterpiece Selection”. He lives in Sapporo, Hokkaido.