When the house in which Junnosuke Yoshiyuki grew up burned down, Lawrence Rogers tells us, "he fled the flames with only his Debussy records and some fifty poems he had written in a notebook."
Given the family in which he was raised, it is no surprise that, even as a teenager, Yoshiyuki had already given art pride of place in his life, and that his relation to art bordered on the neurotic. His father, Eisuke Yoshiyuki, for example was a Dadaist poet, who, in Donald Richie's account, "gave up on literature and threw away his library, all except the three books he had published."
What is surprising is that even a man with as unconventional a background as Yoshiyuki wrote so many stories driven by a fear of being made to conform.