He attended Waseda University before entering the Shōchiku film studios, where he trained as an assistant director under Keisuke Kinoshita.
[2] Yamada left the company at age 30 to focus on writing scripts for television dramas, penning such successful series as Kishibe no arubamu and Fuzoroi no ringotachi.
As a novelist, his novel Ijintachi to no natsu (異人たちとの夏), published in 1987, won the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize.
A third Yamada novel, I Haven't Dreamed of Flying for a While (飛ぶ夢をしばらく見ない, Tobu yume o shibaraku minai), was translated into English and published in 2008.
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