The Nobel Prize in Literature is obviously an incredibly prestigious award, made all the more so due to the fact that besides the members of the Swedish Academy actually deliberating, no one knows who is going to win until they announce it. There are no announced finalists or candidates, just closed meetings that take an entire year to decide.

However, they do allow for the vault to be opened, so to speak, fifty years later, and the public can now finally learn who was officially nominated and in the running in 1961. The Asahi took a look inside and saw that Kawabata Yasunari, Japan’s first Nobel Prize winner in 1968, was first nominated in 1961, along with Tanizaki Jun’ichiro and Nishiwaki Junzaburo.

Kawabata was nominated by a member of the Academy, and Tanizaki and Nishiwaki were nominated by the Japan PEN Club.

The Academy found Kawabata “mesmerizing,” particularly his work A Thousand Cranes, but felt that not enough of his work was translated at the time for sufficient judgement. They did, however, table him for consideration later, though it still took another seven years. The books they had available in 1961 were English, French, and German translations of Snow Country and A Thousand Cranes, along with a German translation of The Old Capital, but by 1968 only a German translation of The Dancing Girl of Izu would be additionally available to them.

Nishiwaki and Tanizaki were on the list of nominees since 1958, but even in 1961 the Academy felt that they lacked information about the two, and that they ought to wait and see.

Fascinating! And only 33 more years until we get to hear about Oe’s competition for that year, and we’ll see how soon before that he was officially in the running. Who other could-have-been’s from Japan are there?