Hiroaki Protagonist is the star of Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash. Like many of the interesting people in his world, he is of mixed race and mixed occupation: a wizard programmer by calling, and intermittently a spy and martial artist, he more commonly makes his living as a Deliverator -- a high-speed pizza delivery driver.

Snow Crash has been called the first post-cyberpunk novel. It is in the character of Hiro that Stephenson takes many of the clichés of cyberpunk to their (absurd) extremes. He is a samurai online, a close confidant of the nobility of cyberspace -- but IRL he lives in a U-Stor-It with a broke Ukrainian rock musician. He has street cred, geek cred, and ninja cred. He is a nobody with massive ninja hacker powers. He is so cool it's ridiculous, and occasionally so ridiculous it's cool.