The Asahi reports Horie Toshiyuki has won this year’s Ito Sei Literary Prize for Fiction for his novel なずな (“Nazuna,” or “Shepherd’s Purse”). It tells the story of a young man taking care of his two month old baby girl.

A simple question to start off the week: What are you reading?! I just finished Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences (see our review!) and so today I’ll either start the book we’ll be reviewing next—Ikezawa Natsuki’s The Navidad Incident—or catch up on a classic that I regrettably have not read yet, but am very excited...

As reported by fellow blogger Nihon Distractions, the winners of this year’s William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize are Karen Thornber’s translation of Toge Sankichi’s Poems of the Atomic Bomb and Matthew Fraleigh’s translation of Super Secret Tales of the Slammer by Narushima Ryuhoku.

The finalists for the Mishima Yukio and Yamamoto Shugoro Prizes have been announced. Unlike the prizes previously mentioned, these prizes are a big deal.

The latest issue of the University of Oklahoma based magazine World Literature Today has a review of a collection of bilingual recordings of poet Ogawa Shizue’s A Soul at Play, and you can listen to a selection of those recordings at their website here. There are four poems for your listening pleasure, and all...