Hirotsu Ryūrō (広津 柳浪, 15 July 1861 - 15 October 1928[1]) was the pen-name of a novelist in Meiji period Japan.

The following year, at the invitation of his father's friend Godai Tomoatsu, he moved to Osaka, and obtained a position as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce from 1881 to 1885.

Around this time, he read the Chinese literature classic Outlaws of the Marsh and the Japanese fantasy novel Nansō Satomi Hakkenden by Kyokutei Bakin.

Heavily influenced by earlier Edo period gesaku writing, his stories are filled with improbable or incredible events, melodrama, romanticism and rather wooden characterization.

His plots are typified by an inexorable progression of the protagonist through a series of pathetic and wretched experiences towards destruction dictated by an inflexible fate.