Kaoru Kurimoto

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-30

Kaoru Kurimoto was the pen name of Sumiyo Imaoka, born February 13, 1953, in Tokyo, Japan, who graduated from Waseda University with a degree in literature in 1975. An extraordinarily prolific writer, Kurimoto authored nearly 400 books spanning science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and yaoi fiction, and also worked as a music critic and jazz pianist with her own ensemble under the separate pen name Azusa Nakajima. Still in her twenties, she won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in the criticism category in 1977, and in 1978 became the youngest-ever winner of the prestigious Edogawa Rampo Prize for mystery fiction. She later received a special posthumous award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan in recognition of her career. Kurimoto's defining achievement was the Guin Saga, a record-breaking heroic fantasy series begun in 1979 and left unfinished at 130 volumes at her death, following a leopard-headed warrior of mysterious origin across a vast, richly imagined world; the series was translated into English, German, French, Italian, and Russian and remains one of the longest single fantasy sagas ever written by one author. Kurimoto is also credited as a pioneer of yaoi literature, a genre of male-male romance fiction, with her 1979 novel Mayonaka no Tenshi (Midnight Angel). She continued writing the final volume of the Guin Saga until just days before her death from pancreatic cancer on May 26, 2009, at age 56.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Leopard Mask (1979) · Guin Saga Core Canon
• The Marches King (1979) · Guin Saga Core Canon
• Prisoner of the Lagon (1980) · Guin Saga Core Canon
• The Battle of Nospherus (1980) · Guin Saga Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 4 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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