Tsutomu Minakami, 水上 勉 (March 8, 1919 - September 8, 2004), also known as Mizukami Tsutomu, was a popular and prolific Japanese author of novels, detective stories, biographies, and plays. Many of his stories were made into movies. Minakami was born in Wakasa, Fukui province, to a poor family. Between the ages of 9 and 12, he was a novice in a Zen temple in Kyoto. Disillusioned by the conduct of the temple's chief priest, however, he left the temple in 1936. He won the 1975 Tanizaki Prize for his biography Ikkyū (一休).