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 the co-author, with his late wife Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art (1988) and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language (2nd ed., 2009). My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki’s Revenge is his first work of fiction. Michael Shapiro is a member of the Society of Senior Scholars at Columbia University. He writes a blog on linguistic usage at languagelore.net. His new book, The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage, based on his blog posts, was published in 2012.