Tow Ubukata grew up in Gifu Prefecture but spent his childhood moving between Singapore and Nepal thanks to his father's work, which gave him exposure to different cultures until his early teens. He broke into the industry young—while still in college in 1996, he won the inaugural Sneaker Taisho Gold Prize for his light novel Kuroi Kisetsu (Black Season).

By 2003, he'd already established himself enough to win the Nihon SF Taisho Award for Mardock Scramble, which started as a three-volume series. Since then, he's worked across pretty much every medium: he's written original scripts for anime like Fafner, contributed to video game projects, penned comic stories including Le Chevalier D'Eon, and developed his own novel series like Bye-Bye Earth and Spiegel. In 2009, he ventured into historical fiction with Tenchi Meisatsu, a novel about an Edo period mathematician.