Shintaro Agi
Shintaro Agi, that was his pen name. His family name was Hideyuki Nogami. I just called him Jiji (Japanese for Grandfather) because he was the father of my partner, Yoko Nogami. He passed away in June and I came across the waters to Japan, joining Yoko, her daughter Tora, Tora's fiancé Justin, and Mitsuko, Mr. Nogami's wife, to memorialize his life. We were joined by a multitude of friends who knew him and his work.
His birth was somewhat biblical. The family needed a male heir to continue the Nogami name. They were just about ready to adopt a male heir when Agi San was born. His mother was forty years old. As a child, strapped to his mother's back, he would go to the theater and watch movie after movie. Jiji grew up in the WWII years. It was tough to find food and having little left for defense, he joined others in sharpening up bamboo spears in anticipation of an American invasion. All that movie going shaped his life. In junior high school he started a theater troupe, wrote plays, and performed leading roles with his sweetheart, Mitsuko(later his wife).He found work with a TV company, but continued to write. Ideas for novels came to him. Jiji found that there was a demand for his writing. He wrote 57 novels. Even when he was bedfast and unable to write he tried dictating a transcript to his wife.
Some of his novels turned into TV productions and he found such a demand for them that he thought, well, you could be anywhere and write. So he moved to Los Angeles, CA. He said he would sit up at night, watch the stars above and the city lights below, and write. He lived 35 years in LA before returning to Japan for good. He died in the arms of his wife and daughter on June 20th, 2026.
Comments