Buckaroo Banzai

I was born in the winter of 1950 in London, the son of two scientists: Masado Banzai, my father, was a brilliant Japanese research physicist whose work in theoretical quantum mechanics is reported to have "rattled" Einstein, and Sandra Willoughby, my mother, was the daughter of the eccentric Scottish-born Texas mathematician Edward McKay Willoughby. They fell in love when she was sixteen and married him twelve years later, after becoming an expert in her own right in the field of negative mass propulsion. They fled Japan at the outbreak of World War II and eventually settled in Texas. I grew up in Colorado and Arizona and was named "Buckaroo" because of my father's love for the American West.