“Tabisuru Mae ni” is a novel by Masahiro Otaka. Centered on the time before departure, it portrays a person beginning to walk toward an empty future in search of a private place or utopia. It won the Gunzo Newcomer Long Novel Prize and was published in book form by Kodansha.

In the blank before a journey, the sense of one person's future begins to waver.

Josho is a novel by Kimio Imai and a winner of the third Gunzo Newcomer Novel Award. As its title suggests, it has the stance of an opening movement toward a larger story, placing personal interior life and the tensions of its time at the starting point of the fiction.

Taking the idea of a beginning as its title, the novel places the tension between an individual and an era at the threshold of a longer narrative.