Levy was born in Berkeley, California, on 29 November 1950 to a Polish-American mother and a Jewish father.
[1] His father named him after a friend who was imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II.
[2] Levy's father was a diplomat, and the family moved around between Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States.
[5] Levy gained attention in Japan as the first foreigner to win the Noma Literary Award for New Writers, which he received in 1992 for his work A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard.
For his contributions to the introduction of Japanese literature to foreign readers, he was honored with a Japan Foundation Special Prize in 2007.