Japanese novelist Seiichi Morimura, known for trilogy about wartime army unit’s atrocities, dies

By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Associated Press

TOKYO (AP) — Renowned Japanese mystery writer Seiichi Morimura, whose nonfiction trilogy “The Devil’s Gluttony” exposed human medical experiments conducted by a secret Japanese army unit during World War II, has died at age 90. His publisher says Morimura died of pneumonia on Monday at a Tokyo hospital. “The Devil’s Gluttony,” which began as a newspaper series in 1981, became a bestseller and created a sensation across the country over atrocities committed by Japanese Imperial Army Unit 731 in China. From its base in Japanese-controlled Harbin in China, Unit 731 and related units injected war prisoners with typhus, cholera and other diseases as research into germ warfare, according to historians and former unit members.