Contents
125th Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2001
Chūin no hana (Flowers in Limbo) by Gen'yū Sōkyū
A story by a narrator who, like the author himself, is a Rinzai Zen priest . The priest has lived for the past six years in a small village in northern Japan, and the plot turns on the way in which the priest accommodates his Zen principles to the syncretic folk beliefs and practices of ordinary Japanese. The story gains thematic depth by the priest's acknowledgment of the value of such beliefs in his relationships with two other characters: a local shaman (ogamiya) who dies on the day she has foretold; and the priest's own wife, who has previously suffered a miscarriage and sought advice and consolation from the shaman.
Neither relationship is free of ambiguity. The shaman, for instance, fails to die on the first date she predicts for her death, and it is a source of concern to the priest that she might be leading one of his parishioners astray. On the other hand, as a boy the priest frequented the house of just such a shaman, and from personal experience he knows that folk belief is a powerful and effective spiritual force. As for the priest's wife, she has been neurotically twisting shreds of wrapping paper into strings for the four years since her miscarriage, and after the shaman dies she begins shaping them into nets. She believes that the spirits of both the shaman and her unborn child will linger in a sort of limbo (the chūin of the title, a state likened to that of steam rising from hot water before it dissipates in the atmosphere) until a proper memorial service is held. At the end of the story, the colorful nets (the "flowers" of the title) are mysteriously set into motion as the priest recites the memorial service his wife has asked for, and she comments that someone's spirit has clearly been set free by the service, even if she is not sure whose spirit it might be. Nevertheless, she seems to feel genuine relief, and the incident causes her husband to realize that he has been neglecting her since her miscarriage, which works to bring the two closer together.
On the whole -- and as recognized by the selection committee, which ultimately voted unanimously for Chūin no hana -- the style and organization are quite accomplished, although some members worried about thematic limitations and expressed dissatisfaction with the handling of the symbolism of the nets in the final scene (they thought the visionary aspect wasn't sufficiently emphasized, although in my view the problem is the patness of the plot). It certainly seems the most thematically ambitious of any prize-winning story from the past few years, and certain aspects are quite fascinating to the layman (the priest's attempt to reconcile Buddhist beliefs and science by locating the seat of consciousness in neutrons, for instance). I personally feel slightly let down by the ending, but otherwise find the story an absorbing and impressive effort by an "upcoming" (Gen'yū is 46 years old) writer.
126th Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2001
Mōsupiido de haha wa (Mom, Flooring It) by Nagashima Yū
A relatively short story narrated by an elementary-school boy being raised by a divorced mother in Hokkaido in the early 1990s. The period of time covered is about one year, and during that time the mother has an unsuccessful engagement, her own mother dies, and her father falls ill, compelling her to drive regularly back to her hometown to take care of him. (The significance of the title comes from the speed at which the boy's mother covers the distance.) The appeal of the story comes from the way the boy becomes in some respects able to appreciate his mother as an individual, this recognition reflecting his own increased maturity. Nagashima's unsentimental approach to the problem of what constitutes family life in contemporary Japan is refreshing, and as long as one does not look for much depth, his dry, objective touch is deftly applied.
The perceived "lightness" of the story did not sit well with some of the selection-committee members, with Ishihara Shintarō and Miyamoto Teru being especially sharp in their criticism. Somewhat surprisingly in view of the caustic comments he made about Nagashima in the last Akutagawa Prize competition, Murakami Ryū voiced strong support for Mō supiido de haha wa, claiming that it was a novel "society needed." As with other writers, Murakami appears to consider his own writing the best model for producing good literature. Strong support for Nagashima also came from Kuroi Senji and Kōno Taeko, with concurring opinions from Ikezawa Natsuki, Hino Keizō, and committee newcomer Takagi Nobuko. Furui Yoshikichi and Miura Tetsuo supported works by other authors.
127th Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2002
Pāku raifu (Park Life) by Yoshida Shūichi
A story told in the first person by a young sales representative for a company that makes bath gels and powders. The man lives and works near Tokyo's Hibiya Park, where he likes to sit during his afternoon breaks and allow his imagination to wander, often to thoughts of the hometown girl who was his first true love but who rebuffed him as being more like a brother than a boyfriend (the two have remained friends, but a key event in the story is the narrator's being told of her plans to get married). In the park, the young man strikes up a friendship with a woman he had earlier stood next to in the subway, and they both seem to take pleasure in the dry, casual relationship that follows. Interspersed with the account of their subsequent meetings are descriptions of the narrator's other acquaintances, including a dysfunctional couple for whom he is babysitting a pet monkey, a paternal, middle-aged colleague, and the narrator's mother, who is making one of her regular visits to Tokyo to see her son and get in some shopping. The story comes to an inconclusive, slice-of-modern-life end when the narrator and his new woman friend view a photo exhibit that includes pictures of the woman's hometown. After visiting the display, the woman tells the narrator she has arrived at a decision about their relationship -- without revealing what the decision is. It may be that she has decided that the time has come for their relationship to be put on a more serious footing, or perhaps she has simply found the potential for increased intimacy too uncomfortable and will say goodbye. The work thus constitutes a contemporary Japanese variation on the theme of lost love, without finally coming down on the side of either encouragement or despair.
The story is enjoyable to read, the author has a sharp eye for the telling detail and a talent for creating memorable descriptions of character, and the portrayal of the semi-anonymous, uncommitted life of the big city rings true. Several members of the selection committee took exception to a perceived superficiality of theme (Ishihara Shintarō, for instance) or the lack of dramatic incident (Miyamoto Teru). But on the whole, Yoshida was commended for his narrative skill and "mature" point of view (Kōno Taeko). I think this is a fair assessment, as long as "mature" is taken to refer to the generation to which Yoshida himself belongs.
128th Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2002
Shoppai doraibu (Salty Drives) by Daidō Tamaki
A story about a woman in her mid-thirties who ends up living with a man in his early sixties. The title comes from the salty ocean air that flows into the car as the two take drives together around the small fishing village that is their home. The man is a longtime family friend who just can't say no when asked for help, a foible that the woman and her family have frequently taken advantage of in the past to borrow money. The woman has lost her sense of direction in life after a brief affair with a dissolute, handsome local actor who still often occupies her thoughts. The gloomy sense of dejection she feels combines with a clear-sighted understanding of her own situation and a defiance of small-town morality to create an ironic and yet sympathetic portrait of the main character.
The story is more of a character study than anything else, and as such it does a good job of conveying the uniqueness of the aging man's personality as well as that of the narrator. The members of the selection committee who opposed giving the prize to "Salty Drives" (especially Ishihara Shintarō and Murakami Ryū), tended to be put off by the lack of both dramatic interest and thematic ambition. Those who liked the story (Kuroi Senji, Miura Tetsuo, Takagi Nobuko, and Kōno Taeko) were attracted to the skillful portrayal of character and to the ironical, somewhat melancholic sense of humor they discerned. The general feeling was that the story is comparatively slight, and many on the committee appear to have been tempted to give the award instead to a story by Nakamura Fuminori titled Jū (The Gun). It is almost as if the committee decided to give the award to Daidō on the basis of her technical improvement as an author (she has been an Akutagawa Prize candidate three times previously). This should probably be counted as one of the weaker recommendations for the prize in recent years.
129th Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2003
Hariganemushi (The Hairworm) by Yoshimura Man'ichi
The plot revolves around the rapid moral dissolution of a young high school ethics teacher who falls prey to his increasingly violent and uncontrollable sexual urges. The main character, Nakaoka Shin'ichi, begins his descent toward society's dark yet fascinating underside after meeting Sachiko, the woman who services him at a Tokyo "soapland" (the narrator himself is from Osaka). Nakaoka's attraction to Sachiko -- uneducated, abused, and married to a no-account -- appears at first glance incomprehensible, but can perhaps be attributed to his deep-seated frustration with the arbitrary moral strictures and hypocrisy of "normal" society (Nakaoka's senior colleague Mrs. Shibata functions as the respectable but still sexually attractive double of the prostitute Sachiko). Nakaoka and Sachiko travel together by car to Shikoku, where Sachiko was born and where she has left her two sons to be cared for at an institution, and after causing Sachiko to lose a tooth, Nakaoka promises to marry her (not out of any sense of sympathy or pity, it should be added). Nakaoka eventually reneges on his promise, and after a particularly grotesque scene of sexual violence involving a group of juvenile delinquents as well as Nakaoka and Sachiko, the two separate. Sachiko has not forgiven him for breaking his promise, however, and the novel ends with her attempt to strangle Nakaoka while he sleeps, an attempt that turns into yet another expression of perverted desire. Otherwise, each chapter in this seven-chapter novel ends on the same note of disgust initiated by the story's opening scene, in which the main character flicks the head off a praying mantis and then watches a hairworm emerge from its abdomen.
The selection committee divided somewhat over the shock value of the over-the-top sexual violence in the story, with Ishihara Shintarō, for example, pointing with approval to the powerfully disturbing depiction of the sorry moral state of contemporary Japanese youth, and Miyamoto Teru, on the other hand, professing to find the depiction merely disgusting and even old-fashioned. Murakami Ryū, while acknowledging Yoshimura's skill, criticized the story for a certain lack of involvement (setsujitsusa) and complained in general that stylistic polish was far too much in evidence among all the supposedly "new" writers under consideration. Others supporting Hariganemushi were Takagi Nobuko, Kōno Taeko, Yamada Amy, and (more reluctantly) Kuroi Senji and Ikezawa Natsuki. Those opposed or strongly favoring other works included, besides Miyamoto and Murakami, Furui Yoshikichi and Miura Tetsuo.
There is no doubting the topical interest of the story (the author himself was formerly a high school teacher and draws upon personal experience), and the violence is indeed stomach-turning in places (the scene in which the hero sews up his girlfriend's arm without benefit of anesthetic bears comparison with the cat scene in Mishima's Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, even as that resemblance lends support Miyamoto's opinion that there is little new under the fictional sun). Although several members of the selection committee commented on what they took to be the slapstick nature of the violence ("it's fiction, after all"), I confess that such humor, to the extent that it exists, left me flat. In Hollywood terms, the story could perhaps be characterized as Beat Takeshi meets In the Realm of the Senses. Those who are disgusted by Takeshi's films or by Ōshima Nagisa's cinematic account of the Abe Sada incident will be equally disgusted by Hariganemushi. Those who like to find social and artistic depths in such films will be able to find them here as well. But it is hard see the story as providing any greater insight into the nature and meaning of extreme, random violence than we already have.
130th Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2003
Keritai senaka (Kick Me) by Wataya Risa
The story of two high school loners on the threshold of adulthood and romantic love. The narrator, Hatsu, is a girl who, although alienated from her classmates, is nevertheless quite typical in her personality and aspirations. She takes an interest in the other friendless student in her class, a boy named Ninagawa, who has a frankly immature crush on an exotic-looking fashion model named Ori Chang. Hatsu attracts Ninagawa's interest by telling him of her chance encounter with the model and -- without becoming overtly romantic --the relationship between the two gradually deepens. The title, which in Japanese more literally means "a back I want to kick," refers to Hatsu's efforts to get Ninagawa to pay more attention to her.
It is important to note that both Hatsu and Ninagawa are loners rather than rebels or even misfits. Hatsu's ordinariness, for example, is effectively conveyed by having her comment on her own plain looks and personality, and by portraying her as unable to read the Chinese character that makes up the first half of Ninagawa's name. The depiction of Ninagawa's immaturity is equally on target, with the adolescent sexuality of his crush on Oli Chang true to what one imagines to be the case with boys in general and Japanese boys in particular. It is this immaturity in Ninagawa that causes Hatsu to feel jealous of Oli Chang and prompts her desire to kick the boy in the back to get him to notice her. This impulse overlaps with the way Hatsu finds herself frustratedly chasing after Ninagawa when they go to a live "fashion concert" featuring Oli Chang, and also with the suggestion at the end that Ninagawa might return her interest when he confesses that when he met first Hatsu he felt as if he were getting caught up in some "great project."
One would like to believe that Wataya is aware of the irony of having two otherwise nondescript Japanese youths getting caught up in a "great project" that, precisely because of the characters' own limitations, is so decidedly restricted in scope and intensity. It is the presence of this irony that allows the story to become more than simply a true-to-life vignette of contemporary Japanese youth, giving rise to a tantalizing ambivalence regarding the possibilities of love. That Wataya may indeed be aware of such irony is what makes the choice of her story for the Akutagawa Prize an altogether appropriate one, although at the same time her stylistic mannerisms tend to narrow the gap between writer and characters that gives rise to the irony, and Wataya seems to have trouble devising an ending that does not come off as, well, a little sappy (this was true of her first novel, Install, as well). But as several members of the selection committee pointed out, it would be little short of churlish to demand too much from a teenager's relatively slight second novel, and it can be said that for the first time in recent memory, the Akutagawa Prize has fulfilled its mission in drawing attention to two genuinely promising young writers.
Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings) by Kanehara Hitomi
In contrast to Wataya's narrator, Nakazawa Rui, the young woman who narrates "Snakes and Earrings" (this English title appears on the cover of the hardback edition), is more of a true social misfit who finds herself entangled in romantic relationships with two obsessively unstable young men. One is "Ama," which the man claims is short for "Amadeus" but is in fact a shortened version of his real name, Amada Kazunori. Ama has gone in for body piercing to such an extent that he has given himself a split tongue like a snake's, a process described in excruciating detail in the opening pages of the novel. Rui accepts his offer to get a tattoo as her introduction to the procedure (one might even say culture) of "body modification," and her self-questioning about her motivation constitutes the story's theme. The friend to whom Ama takes Rui to get her tattoo, Shiba (short for Shibata Kizuki), exerts a powerful influence on Rui, who then decides to have her own tongue pierced and sleeps with Shiba to pay for it.
Rui and Shiba continue their sexual relationship, taking care to hide it from the intensely jealous Ama, and Shiba gets Rui to promise that if she ever feels like dying, she will let him be the one to kill her. Meanwhile, Ama ends up killing a smalltime gangster who approaches Rui one night in Shinjuku and before long himself ends up missing (his mutilated and brutally sodomized body is discovered later). Rui grieves at her loss of Ama despite his shortcomings, for she knows he really loved her, but she soon ends up living with Shiba, who is most likely Ama's killer. Rui is clearly aware of this possibility, but decides to ignore it in the hope that Shiba will take Ama's place.
Whether Rui's final expression of hope suggests redemption or self-deception is the question the reader faces at the end of the story. I think it is the latter, and take the main theme to be one of despair. In that sense, Kanehara's story seems rather more self-consciously literary than Wataya's. Certainly her style seems to be more fully developed, with no trace of the occasionally immature touches one cannot help noticing in Wataya. The structure of the story, however, comes under a strain at the end, with its unlikely catastrophe and the pat revelation of the three main characters' real names, as though too obviously in preparation for a final accounting. If the chief (potential) problem with Wataya is a limited sense of vision, perhaps Kanehara can be said to face the problem of developing a more fully formed aesthetic response to the despair she portrays (even if that answer need not be redemptive). But with the exception of Ishihara Shintarō, who has become something of an old fogy concerning the moral fiber of modern youth, no one on the selection committee seems to have opposed the final selection of Kanehara regardless of their own first choice, and this can no doubt be taken as an indication of her talent. As a result of the astounding amount of media attention lavished on them because of their age and sex, both Kanehara and Wataya must now contend for the foreseeable future with the imposing and unenviable task of making good on their youthful promise.
131st Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2004
Kaigo nyūmon (Guide for the Care of the Elderly) by Mobu Norio
A fairly straightforward story about a 29-year-old Kansai man--the narrator--who discovers the true value of family by undertaking to care for his grandmother, paralyzed and bedridden after a household fall. Spending his nights on a foldaway bed at the old woman's bedside, the narrator passes his days in something of a daze, listening to grunge rock and smoking marijuana; and because his efforts go largely unobserved, he is regarded as an unreliable good-for-nothing by an aunt who -- although always ready to shed a tear over her mother's helpless condition -- is herself careful to avoid becoming involved in alleviating it. Venting his resentment over such hypocrisy (which he formulates into a number of guidelines that provide the basis for the title), the narrator nevertheless finds ample reward in reestablishing strong emotional bonds with his mother and grandmother. The novella's chief conceit lies in a comparison between the narrator and the potentially suicidal character described in the grunge-rock song "Cabin Man" by the Cows. While from the outside it may appear that both have an antisocial death wish, the true desire of each is, as quoted in the last lines of the story, "I WANNA RIIIIIISE!" The narrator's version of "rising" involves acknowledging a deeply felt and yet unsentimentally realistic sense of personal responsibility.
The members of the selection committee devoted most of their comments on the story to its social message and its colloquial style. Furui Yoshikichi held it up as a something of an exemplary tale for contemporary youth, while Kōno Taeko found the characters to be mere puppets operating at the whim of the author. Ishihara Shintarō, deriding the lack of a complicating irony in the guidelines formulated by the narrator, also complained of a mismatch between the seriousness of the theme and the narrator's hip-hop stylistic affectations, particularly the constant use of "Yo, nigger!" (in Japanese the phrase is written "YO hōhai," with the reading nigā attached to the kanji for hōhai). His concern over the story's style was shared by Miyamoto Teru. Takagi Nobuko, more tone-deaf than Ishihara to the phrase's racial implications, in contrast found the content and style to be well matched, and a similarly positive view was expressed by Kuroi Senji. Personally, the use of the phrase struck me as the work of a hip-hop wannabe (inauthentic, if you will), and Yamada Amy was naturally the one to point this out most directly, chiding Mobu for his pseudo-rap style and calling him inaka-kusai for using nigā as the reading for hōhai. The story appears to have won the prize largely on the basis of two or three strong recommendations and the lack of strong support for any single rival (it may also have benefited from the absence of two regular members of the selection committee, including Murakami Ryū). It was rightly recognized as being, below its faux-contemporary surface, a "serious" story about a pressing contemporary issue. But one also suspects that the doubts expressed by several committee members about Mobu's future potential are also on target.
132nd Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2004
Gurando finaare (Grand Finale) by Abe Kazushige
A story about a 37-year-old man who is divorced by his wife after she discovers that for years he has been taking nude photographs of young girls -- including their own elementary-school daughter -- and selling them to pornographic magazines. The narrator, Sawami, is subsequently forbidden by a court order from approaching either his former wife or daughter, fired from the company for which he has been making educational films, and moves from Tokyo back to his hometown in Yamagata Prefecture. But some ten months later, on his daughter's eighth birthday, he asks a mutual friend visit his former wife's house and give his daughter a birthday present along with a note that would result in Sawami's kidnapping his own child. Two days later, when the two friends meet at a club to discuss the outcome, the friend reveals that he only delivered the present, and then he exposes Sawami as a pedophile to some other friends who happen to be partying at the same club. The first part ends with one of the friends visiting Sawami at his hotel the next day, confirming the details of his depravity, and chastising him by by telling him about a friend of hers who had committed suicide because of the abuse she had suffered.
The shorter second part of the story sees Sawami back in his hometown, where a former classmate who is now an elementary-school teacher asks him to help his class put on a play for the school's cultural festival. Sawami at first refuses, wishing to avoid any sort of temptation, but gives in when two of the schoolchildren, sixth-grade girls who are fast friends, plead with him to direct them in a performance based on the German forget-me-not legend. Sawami throws himself into the project with a vigor that suggests he considers it a form of penance. Sawami learns from his schoolteacher friend that one of the girls will be moving away from the town after graduation because of the social shame attached to having an older brother who has committed murder, and at first Sawami imagines that the girls are so insistent on putting on a good performance in order to create a lasting memory of their friendship. Before long, however, he comes to suspect that instead they may be using the play as a kind of farewell statement before committing suicide together. Sawami therefore decides to give each of the girls a parakeet as a Christmas present, hoping that it might dissuade them from carrying out this plan, in the process perhaps serving as a means of personal redemption. This act is meant to be the "grand finale" of the title, although the story ends before it takes place.
Six of the nine members on the selection committee supported the choice of "Grand Finale" for the prize, although with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The most positive vote seems to have come from Takagi Nobuko, who praised the story as a truly frightening depiction of the inner life of a sexual deviant (Yamada Amy was also very positive in her comments). Other members noted the story's social relevance as reflected in its allusions, sometimes explicit, to various news topics (the recent murder of a girl in Nara, an unusual spate of "Internet suicides," the 9/11 terrorist attack, and genocides in Africa). Apparently there was even a measure of sympathy at work regarding the large number of stories by Abe previously considered for the prize (this was his fifth such work). Ishihara Shintarō, however, declared the story to be entirely without merit because it merely constituted a collage of trendy social topics lacking any sort of "internal necessity." This position was echoed in the comments of Murakami Ryū, who, while noting that he ultimately cast his vote for Abe, nevertheless pointed out the author's reluctance to involve himself in a serious exploration of the narrator's psychology, thereby distancing himself from the significance of the real events to which the story alludes and resulting in an awkwardness in the treatment of character and even narrative technique (Murakami faults Abe's use of the first person as a means for exploring the narrator's character).
I find myself to be in almost complete agreement with the negative comments made by Murakami. One might also point out the facile non-ending ending; the structural contrivance of the Tokyo-section-versus-Yamagata- section plot, including the obviously intentional overlapping of the image of Sawami's daughter with that of the two Yamagata girls (Sawami had also presented his daughter with a pet parakeet); a lurking sentimentality toward the end of the story in the treatment of the narrator's motivation; the bizarrely Mr. Bean-like attachment of Sawami to a gingerbread-man doll whose thematic purpose becomes trivialized in the novel's second section; and a lack of skill in writing children's dialogue. Further, given that so many names are actually mentioned in the text (those of the narrator's former wife, his daughter, the mutual friend, and the two sixth-grade Yamagata girls, for instance), it is entirely incomprehensible to me why Abe (or the narrator) refers to two other friends only by the initials, "Y" and "I." As for the central theme, the story can't hold a candle to Lolita, the novel with which it must inevitably be compared (the Japanese term rorikon appears in the story itself, so it isn't as if Abe hasn't heard of Nabokov). As a side comment, it is interesting to note that the start of this story is reminiscent of the start of Murakami's own Akutagawa Prize-winning story "Almost Transparent Blue," an impression that itself suggests a certain lack of narrative ambition. Abe is certainly not without talent as a writer, but this story simply does not haunt the imagination the way one feels it ought to.
133rd Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2005
Tsuchi no naka no kodomo (Child in the Dirt) by Nakamura Fuminori
The narrator is a 27-year-old man who was abandoned by his parents and raised until about the age of seven by abusive relatives. The abuse culminated in an attempt to bury the narrator alive (hence the title), but the boy managed to free himself from this would-be grave and is subsequently institutionalized. Since then, however, the narrator has been unable to function normally in society and now lives a purposeless life with an equally down-and-nearly-out young woman whom he has invited to share his apartment and his bed, even though she takes no pleasure in sex. The girl has an accident after one of her frequent drinking binges, and the narrator goes to the director of the institution where he spent his childhood to borrow the money to pay the hospital bills. The director, whose name is Yanase, readily agrees, but the stress brought on by his sense of worthlessness causes the narrator to hallucinate and nearly suffer a nervous breakdown. Soon afterward, the narrator--who has been working half-heartedly as a taxi driver--picks up two men who try to rob and kill him, bringing back the memory of being buried alive. The narrator resists and manages to escape, but he crashes his taxi and later regains consciousness in the same hospital where his girlfriend is being treated. No trace can be found of the two men who allegedly tried to kill him, and the reader is invited to conclude that the entire incident was a hallucination paralleling the incident with Yanase. Nevertheless, the crash prompts the the girlfriend to take a serious interest in caring for the narrator, and the narrator himself seems to undergo a rebirth of sorts, recovering a sense of self-reliance sufficient enough to refuse to meet his biological father when Yanase tries to set up a meeting between them.
The story ends up being a rather derivative form of existential fiction, aiming for contemporary relevance by addressing the issue of child abuse but focusing thematically on the well-worn motifs of alienation and personal responsibility, and setting those motifs in a rather contrived structural framework that also involves the use of some pretty heavyhanded psychological symbolism. It is rather too self-consciously "literary" (a reference to Kafka's The Castle leaves no doubt on that score), the inner monologues of the narrator eventually grow tedious, and the conversations between the narrator and his girlfriend are unconvincing.
These various problems were recognized by the members of the selection committee, the most disappointed of whom seems to have been Yamada Amy, who excoriates the author for his immaturity in so easily assuming that a stillbirth makes a convincing argument for female frigidity (Yamada nevertheless admits that this story was the only one of the candidates to have any structure at all). Murakami Ryū was opposed, and Ikezawa Natsuki damned with faint praise. The only fully committed member was Kuroi Senji, while most of the others basically agreed to the award on the basis of future expectations -- hardly the sort of positive assessment one might expect of an Akutagawa Prize winner.
134th Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2005
Oki de matsu (Waiting Offshore) by Itoyama Akiko
An affecting, if slight, story about the relationship between a thirtysomething female office worker named Oikawa and a male colleague, Makihara Futoru, who entered the company at the same time she did. Makihara and Oikawa exchange a promise to destroy the hard-disk drive of the other should either one of them die (ostensibly to prevent potentially embarrassing material from being viewed by loved ones). When Makihara is killed in a freak accident, Oikawa (the first-person narrator) keeps her promise, and then -- just before being transferred out of the Kanto area where both have been stationed -- she stops by Makihara's apartment for a last look, there meets his ghost, and the two have a final, nostalgic conversation. The emotional impact of the story comes from the convincing development of the relationship between the two co-workers, which is intimate without being romantic, and from the use of two narrative devices. One of these is structural: arranging for the story begin and end at the same time and place, thereby completing a narrative circle. The other device is the use of the ghost (which could well be purely imaginary), which provides an outside perspective on the narrator herself, thereby closing the thematic distance between the two characters in synchronization with the return to the narrative present.
The use of these devices makes the story rather formulaic, and the irony that the information Makihara wants to keep secret becomes known to his widow by other means seems forced. But Kōno Taeko, for instance, detected a fresh sense of reality in Itoyama's treatment of office life (Oikawa belongs to the category of women employees-- sōgōshoku -- employed on an equal basis with men), and other members of the selection committee preferred to regard the obvious patterning as demonstrating confidence (Yamada Amy) and competence (Miyamoto Teru). Others in favor of the story included Kuroi Senji, Ikezawa Natsuki, and (more passively) Takagi Nobuko. The only outright objections came from Ishihara Shintarō, who lamented the triteness of all current fiction by newcomers, and possibly Murakami Ryū, who did not mention Itoyama at all in his comment but went on at length about the story he thought should have won, Sagawa Mitsuharu's Gin'iro no tsubasa (Silver Wings). Ishihara may be getting rather cantankerous in his old age (he himself mentions the possibility in passing), but it is true that many of the recent stories that have been awarded the Akutagawa Prize seem to have a very narrow field of vision. One might also note that the motivational premise of Itoyama's story is undermined somewhat by the fact that encryption software, properly used, is perfectly capable of keeping the contents of personal files private from pretty much everyone.
The Akutagawa Prize selection committee is currently down to eight members in size, with Furui Yoshikichi having stepped down after the 132nd prize and Miura Tetsuo after the 133rd prize. Replacements have not yet been named.
135th Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2006
Hachigatsu no rojō ni suteru (Tossed Out onto the August Road) by Itō Takami
A story about the failure of the narrator's marriage, as related (and recalled) by the narrator on the day before he files the divorce papers. The narrator, a 29-year-old aspiring screenwriter named Satō Atsushi, has a part-time job with a company that restocks soft-drink vending machines. He is accompanying a female full-time driver, Mizushiro Emi, on her last day out before she transfers to an office assignment in Chiba. Mizushiro is herself divorced, and she and Sato have formed a bond that allows them to speak openly with each other. The story itself alternates between past episodes from Sato's marriage and present scenes involving Mizushiro. As Sato and Mizushiro make their rounds, the reader learns that Sato's wife, Chieko, has become increasingly unstable, in part due to the frustration of her ambitions since graduating from college, and in part due to the reversal of roles in her relationship with Satō (she supported him immediately after graduation, but she has quit working and now relies financially on Satō ). At a stop in Shinjuku, Satō learns from a client that the real reason for Mizushiro's transfer is that she is getting remarried, a fact she has been keeping from him. At the end of the day, Mizushima waves goodbye to Satō as she walks toward the station, after which Satō, acting on impulse, begins digging frantically at the base of a roadside tree.
This last, irrational act clearly seems intended to tie in with the central image in the story, a type of shogi problem Mizushiro calls kemurizume ("smoke end-game"). The point of kemurizume is for the player to sacrifice every piece available (for the pieces to vanish into smoke, as it were) in an effort to checkmate the opponent's "general" -- in other words, to give up everything to win. At the end of the story, Satō indeed seems to have given up everything of value to him -- his marriage, his dreams of becoming a screenwriter, and even his quasi-romantic relationship with Mizushiro -- and yet still seems to cling to the possibility that he can somehow come out on top.
This realistic, psychologically nuanced portrayal of a growing segment of contemporary Japanese youth (including those of Satō's age) seems to have been what persuaded the selection committee to award the prize to Itō, although the praise was by no means overwhelming. In fact, only three of the committee's eight members can be said to have been truly positive in their assessment. (Miyamoto Teru says in his remarks that there were two members strongly in favor and six who were more or less willing to go along. Takagi Nobuko and Kōno Taeko seem to be the two members Miyamoto has in mind, although judging solely from his published comments, Kuroi Senji might also be included in the "positive" camp.) Ishihara Shintarō and Murakami Ryū expressed the strongest doubts, the former repeating what has become his standard mantra about a lack of thematic ambition and an inadequate attention to proper fictional form, the latter similarly complaining that the candidates were all merely producing fiction that seemed to have been "traced" from an existing pattern (nazoru is the word he uses). Both Yamada Amy and Ikezawa Natsuki also weighed in heavily against the limited thematic range and narrow narrative perspective to be found in all the shortlisted works.
On a strictly technical level, the structural patterning of Tossed Out onto the August Road does seem rather mechanical, and the use of kemurizume as the central thematic device is notably heavyhanded. It hardly seems necessary to point out as well the rather too neat coincidence of August 31 being in some sense the "last day" for both Satō and Muzushiro, with September 1, Satō's birthday, either providing for a fresh start or -- especially in Satō's case -- serving to hammer the final nail into the coffin (the reader is told that Chieko asked Satō to registered their marriage on September 1, and that she has also asked him to submit the application for their divorce on the same date). And while Kōno Taeko, for example, claims that Itō's use of the third person in the story is successful, I think that the narrative is flawed in spots precisely because Itō fails to maintain the necessary distance between author and narrator. It is perhaps a sign of Itō's skill as a writer that the narrator's responsibility for the failure of his marriage is not glossed over in the story. Still, one can't help agreeing with Ishihara, Murakami, and Yamada that few of the recent Akutagawa Prize winners seem able to rise much above the quotidian. Must "pure" Japanese fiction really always be so narrowly constricted in scope?
136th Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2006
Hitoribiyori (On My Own) by Aoyama Nanae
A story that centers on the relationship between a young woman, aged 20, and the elderly distant relative, a 71-year-old widow, who temporarily takes her in when the woman moves to Tokyo from Saitama Prefecture in an attempt to establish her independence. The action takes place over the course of a single calander year, with the names of the seasons serving as chapter titles (from spring to winter, with a short "pre-spring" chapter added as a sort of epilogue). The young woman, named Mita Chizu, has rejected her divorced mother's advice to go to college, and instead starts off by working part time as a "companion," serving drinks and attention to male partygoers. The elderly relative, named Ogino Ginko, lives in a rather delapidated house that stands next to the platform of Chōfu station (I haven't yet seen it explicitly mentioned, but Ogino's name is a direct borrowing of the name of Japan's first licensed female physician [dates: 1851-1913], who happens to have been born in what is now the city of Kumagaya, Aoyama's hometown). We follow Mita through two unsuccessful love affairs, her sometimes tense relationship with her mother (visiting China on a teacher-exchange program for most of the story), and her emotional development as she emerges into adulthood. This emotional growth is deeply informed by her relationship with Ogino, although that influence is never made to seem obtrusive and Ogino is portrayed as an individual with an inner life that Mita knows she can never fully be party to. At the end of her year in Ogino's house, Mita accepts the offer of a full-time job, moves into the company's dormitory, and starts a romantic liaison with a married man who works in the same office she does. As a clear sign that Mita has learned one of life's ambiguous lessons, she returns to Ogino the various small items she has stolen from the old woman since her arrival, and also disperses the complete collection of other personal articles she has stolen from people over the years by squirreling them away behind the numerous photographs of Ogino's previous cats that look down from the walls of the room where Mita lives.
The ending of the story might therefore be characterized as programmatic, and, as one of the selection-committee members (Kōno Taeko) noted, some light trimming may have been beneficial in the latter half of the story. Still, Aoyama is quite assured in her style -- the descriptive power of which Ishihara Shintarō praised lavishly, comparing it to impact made by the opening scene of Murakami Ryū's Kagiri naku tōmei ni chikai buruu (Almost Transparent Blue) -- she has an astonishing skill for effectively portraying the personality of a character not herself given to psychological introspection (Mita's habit of stealing small objects from people she knows, for instance, is never fully explored but is all the more compelling for that very reason), and she deals with serious topics -- the difference between youth and age, the solitude involved in growing up -- with a refreshing lightness of touch that does not diminish the significance of the topics themselves. The presence of such composure in so young a writer (at 23, Aoyama is the seventh-youngest Akutagawa Prize winner in history) is surely what prompted six of the eight members of the selection committee to support her for the award, including both Ishihara and Murakami, who have been notably critical of young writers in the past. The other four relatively unqualified supporters were Takagi Nobuko, Kuroi Senji, Miyamaoto Teru, and Kōno Taeko. The lone dissenters were Ikezawa Natsuki, who, while acknowledging Aoyama's obvious skill, preferred a story by a writer he viewed as more willing to "break the mold" of established conventions, and Yamada Amy, who considered Hitoribiyori to be "boring" and "lacking in seriousness" -- the sort of diversion that would be enjoyed by a worldweary man who, on a day off, drowsily sips tea on the veranda of his home. I personally found Hitoribiyori to be much more engrossing than many other recent winners of the prize, and think the award was richly deserved. To my mind, the story is an impressive accomplishment.
137th Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2007
Asatte no otoko (A Distracted Man) by Suwa Tetsushi
"A Dustracted Man" (more literally, "A Man with His Mind on the Day After Tomorrow") takes the form of a collage of reminiscences, diary entries, and philosophical speculation by the unnamed narrator concerning his uncle, Akira, and the possible reasons for the uncle's increasingly strange behavior and eventual disappearance. The story is metafictional in the sense that the narrator starts by offering a "traditional" opening to a story about a character based on his uncle, who was known for blurting out incomprehensible word and expessions at inappropriate times (this "deviance" from the communicative norm is what gives the work its title). He then declares, however, that traditional narrative form is itself inappropriate to the task at hand, and he proceeds to present more objectively -- through diary entries, his own memories, and the accounts of his uncle's wife -- what he knows and has learned about his uncle's precarious relationship with verbal reality. Here, too, however, he is aware that principles of selection and ordering are at work and that interpretive traps attend even this more direct approach. Furthermore, although at the end of the story he claims not to have brought it to a traditional conclusion, the narrator has most definitely returned to his starting point, giving the story a clear shape. The form of the story, in other words, itself seems intended to reflect the central problem of how to effect intellible communication.
According to the narrator, Akira was a stutterer up to the time he entered college, a condition to which the narrator attributes his uncle's lifelong sense of disorientation. Although the stutter miraculously cleared up, the uncle's return to "normality" only seemed to increase his sense of dislocation, resulting after his marriage in the occasional use of meaningless comments and expletives such as "Ponpa," "Hoemyau," and "Taponteau." The narrator is able to trace the linguistic origin of at least one of these words, and he recounts a number of events that indicate Akira's sensitivity to the provisional relationship that obtains between pronunciation and the reality words are assumed to represent. The uncle's attachment to reality became even more tenuous when his wife died in a traffic accident, causing him to isolate himself by moving into an apartment in a neglected danchi, where he apparently devised a private dance incorporating some of his meaningless words that symbolized the conflict between impersonal "will" (the narrator makes a reference to Schopenhauer) and personal agency. Akira then simply vanished, sending his older brother (the narrator's father) a postcard saying that he was going on a trip. The narrator finishes his account by summarizing the evidence he has managed to collect and noting that no further word has been received of his uncle, so that he can provide no satisfactory answer to the problem of his disappearance. But the suggestion that Akira has perhaps "broken through" to some ideal form of reality is strong, and the narrator appends a copy of a diagram of the danchi room in which Akira spent most of his time, implying that this map is meant to take the place of a verbal conclusion. In typical deconstructionist fashion, the appendix thus becomes the true focus of thematic interpretation, and the map functions effectively as both a diagram of the puppet stage and as a kind of Buddhist mandala.
Support for "A Distracted Man" was overwhelming, with six of the nine selection-committee members favoring Suwa for the prize. The two newest members, Ogawa Yōko and Kawakami Hiromi, were especially glowing in their praise, perhaps hinting at a slight shift in the committee's evaluative standards. Opposition was expressed first of all by the usual suspects: Ishihara Shintarō and Murakami Ryū. The former once again lamented the generally poor quality of all the candidates, pointing to the large number of eccentric titles as evidence of a lack of narrative responsibility. With regard to "A Distracted Man" specifically, Ishihara taxed Suwa with being needlessly obscure and relying too heavily upon non-narrative tricks like intertextual diagrams and a postcripted map. One takes Ishihara's point; still, it would appear that he has a major blind spot when it comes to the use of play in narrative (he would have despised Sterne), and he seems notably lacking in a sense humor. Ishihara's own insight as a critic seems quite restricted. Murakami complained, as is his wont, that the quality of the candidates was uniformly low and that it was a chore to read through all of them. He managed some kind words for one candidate, but not for Suwa, whose story, according to Murakami, was highly wrought stylistically but finally contained only the trite message that human communication is imperfect and life hard. Miyamoto Teru was the other dissenter, objecting to what he considered excessive intellectual play.
It is true that Suwa relies rather heavily on the ideas of the philosophers he seems to have encountered as a student (there is an epigraph from Antonin Artaud, whose Theater of Cruelty is thereby invoked, and explicit mention is made of Heinrich von Kleist in an apparent allusion to Kleist's essay "The Puppet Theater"). The story is perhaps a little too philosophical and metafictional for its own good. On the other hand, tieing these philosophical ideas linguistically to the history of Japanese cultural interaction with the West (from the Doctrina Christa to the postcolonial writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o to an extraordinary phonetic rendition of Gilbert O'Sullivan's pop hit "Alone Again (Naturally)"), and then centering the story on the life of a modern Japanese afflicted with stuttering, produces a richly nuanced texture that gives the lie to Murakami's simplistic formulation of the theme. It has been a long time since I read an Akutagawa Prize story that actively encourages intellectual speculation, and one that moreover breathes new life into the dilemma of Japanese "modernity." The Akutagawa Prize this time seems to me to have been well earned.
138th Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2007
Chichi to ran (Of Breasts and Eggs) by Kawakami Mieko
This comparatively short story relates the short visit of a woman and daughter from Osaka to the Tokyo apartment of the woman's younger sister, who acts as the story's narrator. The older sister, Makiko, a divorced woman on the point of turning 40, has ostensibly come to Tokyo to receive breast-augmentation surgery. Her daughter, a sixth-grader named Midoriko, wonders why her mother would want to subject herself to such a potentially dangerous procedure, and is herself concerned about the prospect of starting menstruation, an experience she knows that most of her classmates have already had. Disgusted both by her mother's obsession with the size of her breasts and by the impending physical changes in her own body that signify an unwanted transition to adulthood, Midoriko has refused to speak for almost half a year, communicating instead by writing in a notebook. On the second day of her three-day visit, Makiko visits her former husband without telling her sister or daughter where she is going, and after she returns to the apartment late that night, Makiko and Midoriko engage in a dramatic egg-smashing confrontation, each breaking raw eggs over herself in a symbolic catharsis that has Midoriko regaining her voice to demand that her mother tell her the truth about her motivations, and Makiko replying that some things in life are simply not open to interpretation as "truth."
The title -- "Of Breasts and Eggs" -- thus initially assocates the former image with Makiko and the latter with Midoriko, but the mediation of the narrator and the final egg-breaking scene serve to implicate both in the more general process of life as a woman, with all the physical and psychological complications that this entails. Kawakami seems to aim at a comprehensive synthesis at the very end of the story, where the narrator, whose increasingly irregular period has begun, examines her own breasts in the bathroom mirror and characterizes them as being halfway between funny and pathetic (nakiwarai no yō datta), thus gently reprising the comically melodramatic egg-smashing scene enacted by Makiko and Midoriko. It is a carefully structured story, told in a fluid style that makes effective use of the Kansai dialect, and allusions to Higuchi Ichiyō's classic "Growing Up" were quickly picked up on by readers (not only is "Midori," the name of Higuchi's famous protagonist, appropriated, but the aunt's nickname is "Nattchan," an echo of Higuchi's own real first name, Natsu). "Of Breasts and Eggs" is thus clearly a "gendered" story, but it comes with a lightly worn authenticity that ultimately proves quite compelling and is well attuned to the tone imparted by the Kansai dialect used for the narration.
The selection committee ended up strongly in favor of awarding Kawakami the prize, although it appears that another writer -- the Chinese-born Yan Ii -- had strong inital support. The problem with the 43-year-old Yan, who has lived in Japan for 21 years, was her perceived lack of skill with Japanese. Several committee members (including Ogawa Hiroko, Murakami Ryū, and Kuroi Senji) were prepared to accept linguistic deviations from "standard" Japanese as a valid expressive technique. Other members -- Miyamoto Teru, Ishihara Shintarō, and Yamada Eimi, to name the most outspoken -- were much less forgiving, referring to Yan's Japanese as simply crude. In any case, Ikezawa Natsuki, Ogawa Yōko, Murakami Ryū, Kuroi Senji, Kawakami Hiromi, and Yamada Eimi were firmly in the Kawakami camp, where they were joined perhaps somewhat less enthusiastically by Miyamoto Teru and Takagi Nobuko. The consensus seems to have been that Kawakami's storytelling talent combined with her stylistic skill made her the obvious choice. The only member adamantly opposed was Ishihara Shintarō, who once again railed against all of the nominated works on the grounds of superficiality, and who was especially critical of Yan's Japanese.
Ishihara is fair enough in pointing out that the mother-daughter conflict at the centerof "Of Breasts and Eggs" does not seem especially fresh, and it is also true that Kawakami's stylistic panache tends to obscure such troubling practical questions as why Makiko should have to come to Tokyo for her surgery anyway (a point also made by Ishihara) and why the narrator should feels no qualms in secretly perusing her niece's notebook after she has fallen asleep. No doubt opinions will also vary over the effectiveness of the egg-smashing scene. But while Kawakami flirts with being trite on the one hand and overwrought on the other, on its own terms the story can surely be counted a success. "Of Breasts and Eggs" is deceptively easy to read, but the lasting impression it makes is due in no small measure to that very fact.