From the World of Literature

Japan offers two prestigious prizes for literature. One, the Akutagawa award, is to encourage new writers. The other, the Naoki award, honors authors of popular fiction. Here's what The Japan Times online has to say about this year's winners: they are all women.


Literature prizes elevate women



Jan 25, 2014


Japan may rank extraordinarily low — 105th out of 136 countries — on the world gender gap index, but this year’s winners of two famous literary prizes were all women, an irony that will surely not be lost on the prizewinners and their readers.

The winner of the 150th Akutagawa Prize was Hiroko Oyamada for her novel “Ana” (“Hole”), a story with a woman as the central character.

The two authors who shared this year’s 150th Naoki Prize, Makate Asai and Kaoruko Himeno, also focused on women. They deserve congratulations.

All three authors winning this year’s Akutagawa Prize, for up-and-coming writers, and the Naoki Prize, for popular literature, focused in large part on the experience of women.

Oyamada’s work focuses on a young woman who resigns from work and moves to a rural area, where, after falling in a hole, mysterious events start happening.

Asai’s work describes the fate of women during the end of the Edo Period and Himeno’s explores the everyday life of her female protagonist in Shiga Prefecture.