Round-up of the 2019 Booksellers Award Nominees

Note: A few hours after I published this post, the winner was announced and it was indeed「そして、バトンが渡された」—an overwhelming favorite, with 435 points. The distant second-place winner was 「ひと」, with 297.5 points.

The winner of the 2019 Booksellers Award will be announced at 7pm on April 9 in Japan. I read those nominated books that appealed most to me (I wrote a brief summary of each of the 10 books nominated here). Unlike the Akutagawa and Naoki awards—in fact, most other literary awards—this award is based on the votes of booksellers around the country and is as close as we can get to an award given by ordinary readers (some bookstores even had charts up letting readers vote for their favorite). For that reason, it’s always intriguing to see what is chosen, even if it’s not my favorite.

I think「そして、バトンが渡された」(And then the baton was passed) by 瀬尾まいこ (Maiko Seo) has a good chance of winning, given the enthusiastic response in newspaper reviews. 本の雑誌 (Book Magazine) listed it as their top pick for the best books of the first half of 2018, and the magazine’s review panel was surprised that it hadn’t even been nominated for the Naoki Prize (having read the winner, 宝島, I am not at all surprised—the two books are on a completely different level). One panel member mentioned that it had been nominated for the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize, but had not won because the judges couldn’t believe that a 17 year-old girl could live with a 37 year-old man without the man become interested in her sexually and thus concluded that the entire novel is unrealistic. The entire panel properly expressed disgust and disbelief at this.

This novel, about a girl who has two mothers and three fathers and thus goes through three different last names by the time she graduates high school, does seem unrealistic, but you just have to suspend disbelief while reading. Yuko’s calm and practical way of looking at her situation makes her—and thus the book—very appealing. The first chapter begins with Yuko trying to think of some concern she can share with her teacher, who is convinced that Yuko, with her complicated family relationships, must have deep anxieties that she should share. Yuko desperately tries to think of something—anything—that will satisfy her teacher, but she can’t because she’s happy. Of course it helps that the reasons behind Yuko’s shifting family relationships have nothing to do with abuse or poverty or a broken foster care system, but Yuko also has, of necessity, adopted a philosophy that allows her to focus on the present without being dragged down by anxiety and sadness. She makes a conscious decision, when she is quite young, that she cannot be stuck in the past. Once separated from a parent, that was it—she had to focus on her current life and the people she is with. I found this quite sad, but her clear-eyed stance on the world is refreshing and the other characters in the book—especially Morimiya, her last father—are very entertaining.

Similar to  「そして、バトンが渡された」,「さざなみのよる」 by 木皿泉 (Night of Ripples by Izumi Kizara) takes what could be an unrelievedly sad story—the book begins with Nasumi as she dies of cancer and then shifts to the people she leaves behind—and tries to make it a little more redemptive by showing how Nasumi has affected people in her life. I loved Nasumi’s no-nonsense attitude toward life and her unwillingness to take shit from anyone, but once Kizara started introducing some magical elements into the story (for example, Nasumi’s spirit somehow makes an elevator repeatedly stop on the fifth floor—gokai in Japanese, which also means mistake or misunderstanding—to show a friend that she is making the wrong decision), she lost me a little. So while I enjoyed reading this novel, I was left wondering if simply “enjoying” a book is enough for it to merit an award.  Perhaps it is in the case of the Booksellers Award? After all, this is an award given to the book that booksellers are most enthusiastic about recommending to customers, so this might skew the results toward a book with wide appeal that goes down easily.

I had been looking forward to「愛なき世界」by 三浦しをん (World without Love by Shion Miura) so much that I pre-ordered it from Japan so that it would ship as soon as it was published, instead of my usual method of adding books to my virtual shopping cart and placing an order every few months to save on shipping costs. I love the way Miura digs deep into professions and vocations we don’t normally think about, and the combination of botany and cooking seemed irresistible. But when it came to it, I lost interest about 100 pages in because I wasn’t in the mood for another story about a group of eccentrics immersed in strange occupations and a young woman so dedicated to her research that she has no time for romantic relationships. It felt a little too similar to her previous novels.

I also gave up on 「ひと」 by 小野寺史宜 (People by Fuminori Onodera) because, while perfectly pleasant, by this point I wanted something with a little bite. I was also sensing a theme among the books nominated this year, and sure enough, here was a book about a young man who has lost everything and yet remains good-natured and even finds a new family of sorts.

「ある男」(A Man) by  平野啓一郎 (Hirano Keiichiro) was what I needed. It made me realize that entertainment is not all that I look for in a book (unless I’m stuck on a plane)—I want writing so good that certain sentences beg to be read again, and something to think about when I can’t be reading. Some readers found 「ある男」to be a little affected, as if Hirano is showing off his knowledge, but I didn’t get that sense at all. It is certainly cerebral (especially compared to the other nominees), and the mystery is just the scaffolding that Hirano uses to build his theme. But the questions Hirano poses are fascinating

When Rie’s husband dies in a logging accident, she contacts his family, even though he had wanted no contact with them. When her husband’s “brother” comes to pay his respects at the family altar, he realizes that the man in the picture there is not his brother at all. Rie asks a lawyer, Akira Kido, to help her unwind this mystery of who her husband had really been. This is a fascinating mystery, especially because the koseki (family registry) system is so interesting, but you will be disappointed if you expect an edge-of-your-seat kind of mystery. Kido is able to identify Rie’s husband in the end only thanks to a series of coincidences and lucky conversations with colleagues—he doesn’t actually do much sleuthing, and for months at a time he seems to let it drop all together. What he does do is think (often with whiskey in hand and jazz on the radio)—about what it means to be a middle-aged man, how to define happiness, how to be a father, how to think of his heritage as a third-generation Korean man in Japan, how to live with the ever-present threat of earthquakes. When I picked up this book, I assumed that “ある男” (a man) refers to the dead man Kido is trying to identify, but I began to think that actually Hirano is referring to Kido.

Kido’s own crisis of identity begins after the earthquake in 2011, when he notices that the media has begun to mention the massacre of Koreans after the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923 and that jingoistic books and hate speech targeting Koreans and Chinese are finding a new audience. As if it weren’t bad enough to know that a fault line runs just below the surface in Tokyo, this threat of physical violence makes Kido feel increasingly vulnerable, and for almost the first time he is forced to grapple with what it means to be third-generation Korean in Japan. If he were stripped of his profession and his Japanese citizenship, and reduced simply to someone else’s perception of him as Korean, would he still recognize himself?

Kido became a lawyer because his father saw it as a profession that would keep him safe and earn him respect, and in fact he finds that his job gives him a chance to express who he is as a person—a source of both pleasure and anxiety. A con man Kido meets claims that Kido is essentially laundering his own identity—whitewashing his background to fit in to Japanese society. And Kido does almost envy his mystery man’s ability to take on a new identity. As he explains to his wife, at first he just felt sorry for this man, but gradually Kido became fascinated by the way he had taken on a new identity, and the search for him had become a form of escapism. In the end, Kido does manage to find equilibrium, but Hirano does such a good job of identifying the fragility of our sense of self that it seems precarious.

There’s a wonderful interview of Hirano on the podcast 人生に文学を (in Japanese) in which, in addition to discussing how writing styles have changed in the past 20 years and his Twitter habit, Hirano describes what it’s like to be older now than his father was when he died and imagining his father bathing him as he bathes his own son.

Updated to note that an English translation of this book will be published as “A Man” in May 2020, translated by Eli K.P. William.