The Yomiuri reports that Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro has gone on record to complain about the current Akutagawa shortlist, calling them “nothing but works of idiocy.” Ishihara Shintaro, while currently the governor of Tokyo and a member of the Akutagawa Prize selection committee, has also had a long career as both actor and novelist,...
Read more →Although two weeks ago I proclaimed how different the bestseller list looked from previous installments, this week I realize that the more things change the more they stay the same. Only two entirely new titles appear this week, and even those two have been on the bestseller list in previous weeks, just slightly beyond...
Read more →Hemmi Yo has won the 42nd Takami Jun Award, the Yomiuri reports, for his poetry collection 眼の海 (“Sea of Eyeballs”). It comes with a five million yen prize. “Sea of Eyeballs” was featured in one of our New Release lists back in November. Hemmi Yo is also an award winning novelist, and his novel...
Read more →A previously unpublished manuscript by Takeshi Kaiko has been discovered, the Asahi reported a few days ago. It seems to have been written in 1953 while he was a college student in Osaka. The manuscript is made up of two chapters of a work called 食卓と寝台 (“The Table and the Bed”) and consists of...
Read more →In our first update of the List for 2012, I have added Project Itoh’s Genocidal Organ, coming out from Haikasoru (I assume, though Amazon says Viz) August 21st. Here’s the description, straight from Amazon/the publisher: The war on terror exploded, literally, the day Sarajevo was destroyed by a homemade nuclear device. The leading democracies...
Read more →Over at the Asahi (and probably everywhere else, I haven’t checked yet) they have the names and works of the finalists for the 146th Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes, arguably two of the most important (at the very least most celebrated) literary prizes in Japan (if you didn’t know that already). Quick reminder: Akutagawa =...
Read more →Hon no Zasshi recently reported that publishing company Kadokawa will be now selling 2000 of their e-books on GREE, a Japanese social networking service. GREE is a social networking service (a la Facebook), larger even than MIXI. Apparently a year ago (Wikipedia article so take it with a grain of salt), it was Japan’s...
Read more →Either e-hon took a vacation or last week was a slow week for book releases, as we have an extremely short list this week, with apparently no books out last Thursday or Friday. [Again, sorry for the delay and shortage of articles this week. I currently don't have regular access to internet or time...
Read more →Let me start off with a disclaimer: I was only able to read a tiny fraction of the books that came out in 2011, and only a handful of Japanese fiction titles that didn’t come out this year. I try to read as diversely as possible, and though I’m amazed with myself that I...
Read more →Included in the January 2012 issue of World Literature Today is a short story called “In the Palace of the Dragon King” by Kawakami Hiromi and translated by Michael Emmerich. You can read the whole thing online here. World Literature Today is a bimonthly magazine put out by the University of Oklahoma. You can...
Read more →