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 author with his late wife, the medievalist and Renaissance scholar Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art and of the triptych The Sense of Grammar: Language as Semeiotic, The Sense of Change: Language as History, and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language. His latest book, Palimpsest of Consciousness, is a set of authorial annotations of his only work of fiction, the novel My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki’s Revenge.