Ryōe Tsukimura is a Japanese anime screenwriter and novelist born on March 18, 1963. A graduate of Waseda University’s Department of Literature, he began his career as a preparatory school instructor before transitioning to writing scripts for animation in the early 1990s. His work in anime spans the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, during which he contributed to a range of television series and feature films.

Tsukimura is credited as an original creator of the fantasy adventure series El-Hazard, which began as a seven-episode original video animation (OVA) in 1995. The property was a collaborative creation with director Hiroki Hayashi, and its success led to a television series adaptation, El-Hazard: The Wanderers, which aired later in the same year. The franchise blends comedy, adventure, and romance, and was subsequently adapted into a manga series illustrated by Hidetomo Tsubura, which presented an alternate storyline with its own chronology. Beyond El-Hazard, Tsukimura’s screenwriting credits include the science fiction series Tenchi Muyo! and its theatrical film Tenchi Muyo! In Love, the acclaimed surrealist series Revolutionary Girl Utena, and the crime-action anime Noir.

In the 2010s, Tsukimura shifted his primary focus to prose literature. He launched the science fiction novel series Kikyu Keisatsu (Armored Police), the second volume of which received the Japan SF Grand Prize. He later won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award for his novel Dobo no Hana (Flowers of the Wasteland) in 2015, and the Yamada Futaro Award for the financial crime novel Itsuwari no Shomin in 2019. This body of work demonstrates his versatility across different media and genres. While Tsukimura is best known in anime circles for his contributions to popular 1990s OVA and television projects, his later career as an award-winning novelist solidified his reputation as a significant creative figure in Japanese genre fiction.