Nobuhiko Kobayashi (小林信彦)

Nobuhiko Kobayashi died of multiple organ failure at 11.31 on the morning of 19 October 2026 at a hospital in Suginami, Tokyo, where he had been receiving treatment. He was 93. His funeral was held privately among close family, with his eldest daughter, Mari Sasaki, as chief mourner. Kyodo News reported his death on 23 October, and NHK, Jiji Press, the Asahi Shimbun and the Sankei Shimbun carried obituaries recalling Nihon no Kigekijin, the Karajishi and Oyoyo novels and his decades as a columnist.

Nobuhiko Kobayashi was born on 12 December 1932 in Yonezawa-cho, later Ryogoku, in the Nihonbashi ward of Tokyo, now part of Higashi-Nihonbashi in Chuo. He was the eldest son of the family behind Tachibanaya, a Japanese sweets shop that had been handed down for nine generations since the Edo period. His father, a modern minded man more interested in cars than in trade, took him to kabuki and the yose variety halls, and the boy fell in love with rakugo and with the comedy of Roppa Furukawa, whose voice he imitated at home. His maternal grandfather, Shinzo Takamiya, an early member of Oki Electric, was a strong influence and gave him the first character of his name.

In August 1944 he was evacuated with his school to Naguri in Saitama Prefecture, where he suffered bullying that later became the subject of the novel Fuyu no Shinwa and of Tokyo Shonen. The family home burned in the air raid of 10 March 1945, and he finished the war in Takada, Niigata. Returning to Tokyo in 1946, he attended the secondary school attached to Tokyo Higher Normal School, where he co-founded a film club.

He entered Waseda University in 1951 to read English literature, working part time and reading old film magazines in the library, and graduated in 1955 with a thesis on Thackeray and the picaresque novel. His father died while he was a student, and the family later lost its Nihonbashi land.

Unable to find work in publishing, Kobayashi sold paint for an uncle's company and then worked for a property firm in Yokohama before losing his job in 1958. A proposal he sent to Hoseki, the mystery magazine owned by Edogawa Ranpo, led to his hiring by Hosekisha that autumn, and in 1959, with Ranpo's support, he became founding editor of the Japanese edition of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. He gave early encouragement to Shinichi Hoshi and Yasutaka Tsutsui, popularised the short short story in Japan and, with his brother Yasuhiko as illustrator, helped bring the word illustration into Japanese magazines. He left the company in early 1963.

As a freelance he wrote criticism and scripted television variety shows such as Kyu-chan! and the Ueki Hitoshi Show, and coined the title of Geba Geba 90 Pun. His first book, a study of film comedy, appeared in 1963, and his first novel, Kyoei no Ichi, followed in 1964 under the pen name Yumihiko Nakahara. From 1969 he concentrated on fiction, producing the Oyoyo series, the Karajishi gangster parodies, the Jinno Suiri mysteries, the Shinshi Domei caper novels and the mock scholarly W. C. Flanagan books. He was nominated several times for the Naoki and Akutagawa prizes.

His criticism was equally influential. Nihon no Kigekijin (1972) traced Japanese comedy from Enoken and Roppa onwards and won the Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists in 1973; he kept revising it for the rest of his life. He wrote biographies of Kiyoshi Atsumi, Yasushi Yokoyama, and Hitoshi Ueki with Kanbi Fujiyama, and essays on Tokyo such as Shisetsu Tokyo Hanjoki. His 1986 novel Bokutachi no Suki na Senso closed what he called the first period of his career. He wrote the column Honne o Moseba and its predecessor for Shukan Bunshun from 1998 to 2021, received the Kikuchi Kan Prize in 2006 and a special award from Kinema Junpo in 2023.

Kobayashi's younger brother, Yasuhiko Kobayashi, became a well known illustrator and designed and illustrated the Hitchcock magazine and many of his books; the two collaborated on a picture book and, from 2025, on a series of conversations in the literary magazine Bungakukai. Through his wife's family he was connected by marriage to the novelist Futaro Yamada and the comedian Roppa Furukawa. He kept a detailed diary from his youth, part of which was published as his diary of the 1960s, and carefully collected reviews of his own books.

In April 2017 he suffered a stroke at home that left the left side of his body paralysed. After rehabilitation he broke his left leg twice and returned to hospital, experiences he described in Shukan Bunshun and collected in the book Seikan in 2019.

Kobayashi is remembered as the writer who first treated Japanese comedy as a subject for serious criticism, drawing on what he had seen with his own eyes from the prewar halls of Asakusa onward. As editor of the Hitchcock magazine he helped launch major science fiction and mystery writers, and his comic novels and humorous essays, unusual in Japanese literature, influenced later generations of writers on popular culture. His books on Tokyo preserved a detailed memory of the old merchant district of his childhood, and the critic Kenji Kazama called him Japan's original otaku writer.