, real name , was a Japanese writer and poet born in Mizuhashi (now part of Toyama City), Toyama Prefecture

Toyama Prefecture

is a prefecture of Japan located in the Hokuriku region on Honshū island. The capital is the city of Toyama.Toyama is the leading industrial prefecture on the Japan Sea coast, and has the industrial advantage of cheap electricity due to abundant water resources....

, 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...

. She was known for her works of fiction and nonfiction about people affected by World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

. Henmi was the daughter of Genyoshi Kadokawa, founder of publisher Kadokawa Shoten

Kadokawa Shoten

is a well-known Japanese publishing company based in Tokyo, Japan. Kadokawa has published both manga novels and magazines, such as Newtype magazine...

 and the older sister of Haruki Kadokawa

Haruki Kadokawa

is a Japanese publisher, film producer, director and screenwriter. He was the son of Genyoshi Kadokawa and inherited the position of president of the publishing house Kadokawa Shoten in 1975. Under his guidance, the company soon branched into film production, and by 1994 Kadokawa had produced close...

.

Henmi won the Nitta Jirō Culture Prize in 1984 for her 1983 book Yamato: The Last Battle , about crew members of the Japanese battleship Yamato

Japanese battleship Yamato

, named after the ancient Japanese Yamato Province, was the lead ship of the Yamato class of battleships that served with the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. She and her sister ship, Musashi, were the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever constructed, displacing...

 and their final voyage during Operation Ten-Go

Operation Ten-Go

was the last major Japanese naval operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Other renderings of this operation's title in English include Operation Heaven One and Ten-ichi-gō....

. The book was later made into a 2005 movie under the same title. Henmi also won two nonfiction literary awards for her 1989 work Shūyōjo kara Kita Isho about notes received 10 years after World War II by the family of a man who died in a Russian prison camp in Siberia.

Henmi died on September 21, 2011 after collapsing in her home in a Tokyo suburb. She was 72 years old.