is a Japanese

Japanese people

The are an ethnic group originating in the Japanese archipelago and are the predominant ethnic group of Japan. Worldwide, approximately 130 million people are of Japanese descent; of these, approximately 127 million are residents of Japan. People of Japanese ancestry who live in other countries...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 of popular fiction active during the Showa

Showa period

The , or Shōwa era, is the period of Japanese history corresponding to the reign of the Shōwa Emperor, Hirohito, from December 25, 1926 through January 7, 1989.The Shōwa period was longer than the reign of any previous Japanese emperor...

 and Heisei periods of Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

.

Biography

Saitō was born in Ota-ku, Tokyo. In 1944, he moved with his mother to her hometown of Fujisawa, Kanagawa

Fujisawa, Kanagawa

is a city located in Kanagawa, Japan. As of 2010, the city had an estimated population of 407,731 and a population density of 5,870 people per km². The total area is 69.51 km²-Geography:...

. He started writing novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

s from junior high school. In high school, he was a classmate of Shintaro Ishihara

Shintaro Ishihara

is a Japanese author, actor, politician and the governor of Tokyo since 1999.- Early life and artistic career :Shintarō was born in Suma-ku, Kobe. His father Kiyoshi was an employee, later a general manager, of a shipping company. Shintarō grew up in Zushi...

, and assisted him in the creation of the literary circle Shonan Bungei. After graduating from Tokyo University with a legal degree, he went to work as a bureaucrat at the Yokohama

Yokohama

is the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture and the second largest city in Japan by population after Tokyo and most populous municipality of Japan. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu...

 city hall, continuing to write novels on the side. With his legal background and Tokyo University credentials, he was often offered more lucrative posts within the central government, but he always refused as this would rob him of time to write.

In 1966, Saitō was awarded the 12th Edogawa Rampo Award

Edogawa Rampo Award

The , named after Edogawa Rampo, is a Japanese literary award which has been presented every year by the Mystery Writers of Japan since 1955.Though its name is similar to the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, which has been presented by Mystery Writers of America, the Edogawa Rampo award is not a counterpart...

 for his mystery novel  He followed on this with several best-selling mystery series, creating the "Tarot Himeko series", the "Inspector Edogawa Murder-Travel series", and the "Inspector Kobayakawa series", which were the basis for several popular television series.

Saitō is known for his tremendous creative speed, at times producing several hundred pages of work a week, or completing a novel within the span of a month. In particular, the Tarot Himeko series exceeded 80 novels from 1985 to 1992, and is also credited with creating a revival in the fortune-telling

Fortune-telling

Fortune-telling is the practice of predicting information about a person's life. The scope of fortune-telling is in principle identical with the practice of divination...

 industry and the sales of tarot cards in Japan.