Tozene, Kachakuchane by Chihiro Kudo won the grand prize of the third Hayashi Fumiko Literary Award. As its dialect-inflected title suggests, the story uses local language and lived texture to depict emotional wavering and tangled relationships.

Local speech brings the characters' inner lives close to the texture of their everyday world.

Fukaku, by Satomi Nakanishi, received an honorable mention in the third Hayashi Fumiko Literary Award. Its brief title leaves a quiet resonance, suggesting a short story that descends into the depths of a character's inner life and relationships.

The space around a single word invites the reader to imagine emotional depth and the deepening of relationships.