His work explores questions of identity, with characters outside predefined social groups. An all-consuming desire to tell stories led him from a PhD in Architecture from the University of Tokyo to a life of filmmaking. He earned an MFA in Film and Television from UCLA, and his screenplays have received a Samuel Goldwyn Screenwriting Award, have been shortlisted twice for the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, selected by Francis Ford Coppola as a finalist in Zoetrope Screenwriting Competition, and selected by the Sundance Institute for the Screenwriters Intensive. He’s currently developing A Road to Damascus, a feature film based on his mystery novel published by Interlink and released in the United States in April 2018