Up to his ears in debt and with absolutely no money, Ichiriki Yamamoto made a bold prediction to his wife.
"From now on, I'll write novels to support the family," he said in 1994.
Ichiriki, 54, and his wife Eriko, 38, had been involved in a long-running inheritance dispute over land in Tokyo's Ginza district owned by Eriko's late father. In 1991, the court ordered her family to pay 1.7 billion yen to her four aunts and to hand over two other plots of land in return for keeping the plot of land in Ginza.