Aono Reki's prize-winning debut follows four high school students as they move between soccer, art, and poetry, tracing the wavering outlines of self-awareness and friendship. The story links the shift from spring to early summer with the uncertainty of young emotions.

Under the spring rain, everyone is still trying to grasp the outline of who they are.

Kudan Rie's debut, winner of the 126th Bungakukai Newcomer Award, appears in the collection Schoolgirl. It sharply portrays the skewed distance between mother and daughter, and the way music and language can unsettle a person from within. The result is a tightly wound work where heightened self-consciousness and suffocating pressure arrive together.

The rhythm of the prose quietly carves out the distance between mother and daughter.