Junot Díaz is the author of The, Brief, Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008, and the short story collections Drown and This Is How You Lose Her. He was born in the Dominican Republic and teaches creative writing at MIT.

Junot Díaz praises the Japanese capital's insane urbanism, costume tribes, and salsa in Roppongi in part of Newsweek International's "The City" series.