Winners of 160th Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes

The winners of the 160^th Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes—the last in the Heisei era—were announced on January 16. I always look forward to reading the winners of the Naoki Prize, which is generally awarded to an “entertainment” novel written with a straightforward, approachable style, but sometimes the Akutagawa Prize seems more like a lens into what Japanese literary critics value in literary fiction today than a guide for my own reading.  This year all three (two novels won the Akutagawa Prize this time) look interesting, and are also quite varied in subject and style.

上田岳弘 (Takehiro Ueda) won the Akutagawa for his novel 「ニムロッド」 (Nimrod). He previously won the Shincho Prize for New Writers with his debut novel, 「太陽」 (Sun), and the Mishima Yukio Award for 「わたしの恋人」(My Lover). “Nimrod” begins when the main character, a man employed at a server maintenance company, is ordered to record bitcoin transaction data. Ueda describes how the entire bitcoin scheme rests on the notion that our existence is verified when our data is recorded, but also incorporates the everyday with scenes between the main character and his girlfriend and his exchanges with co-workers. A novel that one of these co-workers is writing is also skillfully woven in. One of the judges said that Ueda’s novel won for its “skill in linking a bold world view with the everyday.” In this novel, Ueda explores how to best live as individuals in an information society, but he seems to answer this question for himself through his writing: in an interview he stated that “continuing to engage in art, regardless of whether it has any meaning, guarantees our humanity.”

町屋良平 (Ryohei Machida) 「１Ｒ１分３４秒」(One Round One Minute 34 Seconds) won the Akutagawa Prize for his novel about a professional boxer who has never won a match since winning by knockout in his debut fight. He has lost all sense of his place in the world, both at his boxing gym and his part-time job, but this begins to change when he meets an eccentric trainer. Machida described his feelings on hearing that he’d won the Akutagawa as similar to winning by “technical knockout”—he’d written all out and suddenly it was over.

真藤順丈 (Junjo Shindo) was awarded the Naoki Prize, as well as the Yamada Futaro Award, for his novel 「宝島」 (Treasury Island) about the ties between three close friends living on Okinawa. The novel covers the 20 years from 1952 to 1972, when the US government handed control of Okinawa back to Japan. Shindo has said that as he is not from Okinawa, he hesitated to write this story, but his interest in the demonstrations against the bases in Okinawa and incidents involving US soldiers spurred his interest in Okinawa’s post-war history. In his research, he learned about a gang of Okinawans who looted US bases for food, and was inspired to write about it. Shindo hopes that this novel will be an opportunity for people to think about the problems people face in Okinawa–this may make it sound heavy, but reviews of this book all mention its humor and sense of hope.

「ニムロッド」and 「１Ｒ１分３４秒」 will be published later this month. 「宝島」 was published in June but is now on backorder. Hopefully the publishers will catch up with demand soon. For now, you can listen to 荻上チキ discuss all three books with a literary critic on his Session-22 podcast (here).