Ian Hideo Levy (born 1950) is an American-born novelist and scholar of Japanese literature. Born in California and raised partly in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he studied Japanese literature at Princeton University and later taught at Princeton and Stanford. His English translation of the "Man'yoshu," Japan's oldest surviving anthology of poetry, received the U.S. National Book Award, and he settled in Japan in 1989. Choosing to write fiction in Japanese rather than his native English, Levy won the Noma Literary New Face Prize in 1992 for "Seijoki no Kikoenai Heya." Set in Yokohama and Shinjuku in the late 1960s, the work follows a young American who leaves his father and the protected world of the U.S. consulate behind, entering a Japanese-speaking city where questions of language, nationality, and belonging become inseparable from his search for a place of his own.
