His novel Black Rain, about the bombing of Hiroshima, was awarded the Noma Prize[1] and the Order of Cultural Merit.

[2] Ibuse was born in 1898 to a landowning family in the village of Kamo [ja], now part of Fukuyama, Hiroshima.

[3] Although Ibuse enjoyed the Western influences in his education, his grandfather arranged for a private tutorial in Chinese literature.

[citation needed] In 1917, at nineteen years of age, Ibuse began studying at Waseda University in Tokyo.

[3] In Tokyo, Ibuse befriended eccentric young men and literary hopefuls but often found inspiration in his loneliness and encounters with Geisha.

Ibuse's first literary works were in prose, and he started writing his first essays in 1922 shortly after the death of Aoki.

[3] Ibuse began to be recognised in the late 1920s, when his work was favorably mentioned by some of Japan's top critics.

With the publication of Salamander in 1929, he began to write in a style characterized by a unique blend of humour and bitterness.

He was awarded the Naoki Prize for John Manjirou, the Cast-Away: his Life and Adventure and continued to publish works filled with warmth and kindness, while at the same time showing keen powers of observation.

The themes he employed were usually intellectual fantasies that used animal allegories, historical fiction, and the country life.

[5] In 1966 he published his novel Black Rain, which won him international acclaim and several awards including the Noma Prize and the Order of Cultural Merit, the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a Japanese author.

An earlier story by Ibuse, Kakitsubata ("The Crazy Iris", first published in 1951), deals with similar themes.