Yutaka Mafune

Yutaka Mafune (真船豊) was a Japanese playwright active during the Showa period of Japan.

Biography
Mafune was born in what is now Koriyama city, Fukushima prefecture. He studied at the Literature Department of Waseda University in Tokyo, where he was influenced by Irish theater, and where he started to write one-act plays. He left school to join a leftist agrarian movement in the late 1920s. Some of his early works, including Itachi ("Weasel", 1934) depict the lives of peasants. He then turned his attention to the urban proletariat with Hadaka no machi ("Naked City", 1936), which was subsequently made into a movie.

After World War II, Mafune turned towards works of comedy and farce. He also wrote scripts for radio dramas.