In a backwater town in northern Kyushu, middle schooler Kai—who is missing half his right hand—falls under the spell of a local man called Tachibana-san while drifting with a delinquent crowd. When Tachibana-san gets into trouble with a Tokyo rapper, Kai boards a night bus alone and heads for the capital. A raw, urgent story of a boy's desperation, awarded the 60th Bungeisho Prize by unanimous consent.

A desperate runaway story of a boy burning with nowhere to go.

Reonardo, who has never left his room since birth and can't remember anything from a few days ago, begins reading 'your story,' a file on his father's laptop. The prodigiously memoried quiz champion he once was, his teammates, a linguistically gifted pedigree dog—multiple world-lines shatter the boundary between fiction and reality in this ultimate multiverse novel.

This world should be destroyed—true or false?

Twenty-five-year-old Miho takes a ¥2,000 taxi to avoid being late for a ¥7,500-a-day part-time job, scrolling alternately between a consumer finance app and a dating app. Shopping addiction, sexual dependency, broke and fighting parents, a stalker ex-classmate—the gears accelerate with a single death and hurtle toward the bottom. Praised by judge Machida Ko with 'This one hit me. It hit me hard.'

She throws away her life to live in the present, racing headlong toward the despair and hope at the very bottom.

A fantastical single night surrounding 'I,' 'Time,' and the narrator's mother in a town where women play 'womb-toss.' Every sentence from first to last is shot through with extraordinary talent. The debut work of Nishino Touki, born in 2007 and sixteen years old at the time of winning the short fiction division of the 60th Bungeisho Award.

Every sentence, from the first line to the last, carries an exceptional talent and expression.

Hiyori's body is riddled with holes that fill with liquid. Surrounded by Ikkun, who says he'll 'pierce the bottom of the hole,' and a mother who tells her to 'become a pipe,' she lives in a world of peculiar weight and moisture. This outstanding work from the 60th Bungeisho Award's short fiction division was collected with the post-debut story 'Niwa ni Tsugu' in a 2026 volume.

A world of peculiar weight and moisture that quietly pulls you under.