Japanese Literary Awards

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Yomiuri Literary Award よみうりぶんがくしょう

Edition 54 (2002)

NovelPlay/ScreenplayEssay/TravelogueCriticism/BiographyPoetry/HaikuResearch/Translation

Winners

6 people
Minae Mizumura みずむら みなえ award

本格小説 by 水村美苗 is a work that recasts the sweep of a nineteenth-century romance in modern Japanese settings, centering on class, memory, and a long-shadowed love.

A grand romance of love, class, and memory unfolds across postwar Japan and America.

469 pages
romanceclassmemorypostwar Japan
Youji Sakate さかて ようじ award

屋根裏 by 坂手洋二 is a work that turns a tiny hidden room into a theatrical device for isolation, social anxiety, and the wish to disappear.

A hidden attic becomes the smallest stage for loneliness, fantasy, and social fear.

380 pages
isolationsocial anxietytheaterfantasy
Mikirou Sasaki ささき みきお award

アジア海道紀行 by 佐佐木幹郎 is a work that travels the seas around East Asia and reads maritime routes as spaces where cities, people, and histories meet.

The sea is read as a city, a road, and an archive of Asian contact.

280 pages
sea routesEast Asiatravel writinghistory
Takehiko Noguchi のぐち たけひこ award

幕末気分 by 野口武彦 is a work that looks at the late Tokugawa period as a recurring mood of political exhaustion, profit, and historical drama.

The end of an era is treated not as the past alone, but as a recurring political sensation.

284 pages
Bakumatsuhistorical essaypolitical mood
Kai Hasegawa はせがわ かい award

虚空 by 長谷川櫂 is a work that gathers haiku that open empty space into wind, grief, season, and the presence of what has vanished.

The poems let wind, silence, and grief expand inside a few syllables.

231 pages
haikuemptinessseasonmourning
Yuuichi Takamatsu たかまつ ゆういち award

イギリス近代詩法 by 高松雄一 is a work that examines modern British poetry from Wilde and Yeats to Eliot through close attention to technique and structure.

A study of poetic technique that follows modernism through form and tension.

436 pages
modern poetryBritish literaturepoetics