Jakob Halskov has a university degree in Japanese and has also studied Korean. After first visiting Japan and Korea in 1995, he has travelled extensively in both countries and is deeply fascinated by their cultures and languages. He has even lived in Tokyo for a couple of years, working for a Japanese company on a local contract. These experiences and interests have propelled him and provided the inspiration and motivation for writing The Tokyo Trilogy. As his day job, Jakob works as an IT specialist in a larger Danish company. He is married, has two kids and lives in the Copenhagen area.

According to reliable sources, Jakob started typing up everything from train timetables to Donald Duck dialogues on the old family typewriter when he was only 7 years old in the early 80s. In the late 90s, he struggled hard to learn how to write the almost 2,000 Chinese characters used in modern Japanese (“kanji”), and experienced a bit of a breakthrough when he was finally able to read his first Murakami Haruki novel in the original language at the end of his university language training.