Nakajima Atsushi was born in Yotsuya, Tokyo. His father, like three other brothers from the same family, was a scholar of Chinese classics and taught that subject in middle school. This family background exerted a strong influence on Nakajima's own literary tastes. In 1926 Nakajima entered the First High School, advancing to the Japanese literature department of Tokyo University in 1930, from which he graduated in 1933. He continued his studies in the university's graduate school for a year after this, but in 1934 left the university without a degree. Meanwhile, he also found a job teaching at Yokohama Women's High School, a position he was to hold until 1941. Nakajima submitted the story Toragari (Tiger Hunt) to a contest for new writers sponsored by Chuō Kōron magazine in 1934, marking his debut on the literary scene. This and his later fiction gave him something of a reputation as an aesthetically oriented stylist.

In 1941, Nakajima went to the Palau Islands as a participant in the Japanese government's program to teach Japanese to residents of occupied territories. Before leaving Japan, he completed the manuscript of Tsushitara no shi (Tusitala's Death), a novella based on the life of Robert Louis Stevenson, which he revised while in Palau and published in 1942 as Hikari to kaze to yume (Light, Wind, and Dreams), winning consideration as a candidate for the Akutagawa Prize. Tormented throughout his life by asthma, Nakajima found it necessary to resign from the Japanese government's South Seas Agency (Nanyō-chō) and return to Japan in March 1942. There he intended to devote himself completely to his writing, but his health sustained an additional setback when he contracted pneumonia. The added burden proved to be too much for Nakajima's fragile constitution, and he died in the winter at the age of just 33.

Nakajima's works are widely admired both for their use of traditional Chinese sources and for the extraordinary quality of the language in which those sources find expression.

• Light, Wind, and Sand. Trans. Akira Miwa. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1962. New York: Oriental Books, 1962.

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