Makoto Shiina (born 1944) is a Japanese writer, essayist, editor, photographer, and film director from Tokyo. After working as the editor of a trade magazine for the distribution industry, he helped establish the book-review magazine “Hon no Zasshi” and served as its first editor in chief. Shiina made his literary debut in 1979 with “Saraba Kokubunji Shoten no Obaba” and has since written travel essays, autobiographical fiction, science fiction, and works combining photography and prose. He received the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for New Writers for “Inu no Keifu” and the Nihon SF Taisho Award for “Ad Bird,” while his film “The White Horse” won the Japanese Movie Critics Award for Best Director. His representative work, “Gaku Monogatari,” portrays the childhood of his son Gaku, an independent boy absorbed in fishing and wrestling, and records a father’s mixture of affection, bewilderment, and pride as the child gradually begins to move beyond his parents’ world.