Toh EnJoe


Toh EnJoe is a Japanese author and television writer. Most of his works are literary fiction or speculative fiction.

Biography

EnJoe was born on 1972 in Sapporo. He graduated from the physics department of Tohoku University, then went on to the graduate school at University of Tokyo and received Ph.D. for a mathematical physical study on the natural languages. He worked as a post-doc researcher at several research institutes for seven years, then abandoned the academic career in 2007, and found a job at a software firm, which he left in 2008 to become a full-time writer.
In 2006, he submitted his science fiction novel Self-Reference ENGINE, made up of a number of related short works, to be considered for the Komatsu Sakyō Award. It was a finalist. It was published the following year by Hayakawa Shobō. In the same year, his short story "Obu za bēsbōru" won the contest of literary magazine Bungakukai, which became his debut in literary fiction.
His literary fiction work is often dense with allusions. Numerous annotations were added to "Uyūshitan" when it was published in book form in 2009, with none appearing in its initial magazine publication. EnJoe's science fiction works often employ mathematical motifs. The narrator of "Boy's Surface" is a morphism, and the title is a reference to a geometrical notion. In "Moonshine", natural numbers are sentient through a savant's mind's eye in a field of the monster group.
Project Itoh's Genocidal Organ was also a finalist of Komatsu Sakyō Award contest. It was published from Hayakawa Shobō in 2007, along with Enjoe's Self-Reference ENGINE. Subsequently, they often appeared together at science fiction conventions and conducting interviews, and collaborated in a few works. Itoh died of cancer in 2009. At the press conference after the announcement of Enjoe's Akutagawa Prize in January 2012, he revealed the plan to complete Itoh's unfinished novel Shisha no teikoku. It was published in August 2012 and received the Special Award of Nihon SF Taisho.

Awards

Japanese

Translated into English

English translations (book length)

  • Self-Reference ENGINE, Haikasoru/VIZ Media, 2013
  • Harlequin Butterfly, Pushkin, 2024

    Short fiction in English translation

  • "Freud"
  • "Silverpoint"
  • "Meditations on Green"
  • "Endoastronomy"
  • "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire"
  • "Harlequin's Butterfly"
  • "Time in "Time""
  • "Printable"
  • "A Record of My Grandmother"
  • "List, Combination, Recursion"
  • "Time Together"
  • "Three Twitter Stories"
  • "First Sentence"
  • "Twelve Twitter Stories"
  • "The Squirrel Awakes"
  • "Overdrive"
  • "Shuffle Drive"
  • "Shadow.net"

    Scripts

  • "I'm Never Remembering You, Baby" – writer
  • "An Other-Dimensional Tale, Baby" – writer, guest character design
  • Godzilla Singular Point – writer, series composition
  • The [Ghost in the Shell (2026 TV series)|The Ghost in the Shell] – writer, series composition

    Reception

An interviewer in the literary journal Asymptote wrote, "Toh EnJoe's stories are known for their scientific lucidity and literary impenetrability. His language and his writing style, however, belie his background as a physicist: topics woven into his stories include science, but also linguistics, literary theory, and philosophical approaches to the imagination. His complicated narrative structures are the subject of heated discussions and have even evoked harsh reviews calling his work 'indigestible', 'sleep-inducing,' and 'reader-unfriendly'."

Additional reading