Michael Shapiro was born in Yokohama in 1939 and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He spent the war years in Japan before immigrating to Los Angeles with his parents in 1952. In 1965-66 he was a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at Tokyo University and spent the next forty years in the United States as a university professor of Slavic and semiotic studies. He is co-author, with his late wife Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art.

My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki’s Revenge is his first work of fiction.

His blog is at www.languagelore.net.