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135th Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2006
Hachigatsu no rojō ni suteru (Tossed Out onto the August Road) by Itō Takami
A story about the failure of the narrator's marriage, as related (and recalled) by the narrator on the day before he files the divorce papers. The narrator, a 29-year-old aspiring screenwriter named Satō Atsushi, has a part-time job with a company that restocks soft-drink vending machines. He is accompanying a female full-time driver, Mizushiro Emi, on her last day out before she transfers to an office assignment in Chiba. Mizushiro is herself divorced, and she and Sato have formed a bond that allows them to speak openly with each other. The story itself alternates between past episodes from Sato's marriage and present scenes involving Mizushiro. As Sato and Mizushiro make their rounds, the reader learns that Sato's wife, Chieko, has become increasingly unstable, in part due to the frustration of her ambitions since graduating from college, and in part due to the reversal of roles in her relationship with Satō (she supported him immediately after graduation, but she has quit working and now relies financially on Satō ). At a stop in Shinjuku, Satō learns from a client that the real reason for Mizushiro's transfer is that she is getting remarried, a fact she has been keeping from him. At the end of the day, Mizushima waves goodbye to Satō as she walks toward the station, after which Satō, acting on impulse, begins digging frantically at the base of a roadside tree.
This last, irrational act clearly seems intended to tie in with the central image in the story, a type of shogi problem Mizushiro calls kemurizume ("smoke end-game"). The point of kemurizume is for the player to sacrifice every piece available (for the pieces to vanish into smoke, as it were) in an effort to checkmate the opponent's "general" -- in other words, to give up everything to win. At the end of the story, Satō indeed seems to have given up everything of value to him -- his marriage, his dreams of becoming a screenwriter, and even his quasi-romantic relationship with Mizushiro -- yet still seems to cling to the possibility that he can somehow come out on top.
This realistic, psychologically nuanced portrayal of a representative of a growing segment of contemporary Japanese youth seems to have been what persuaded the selection committee to award the prize to Itō, although the praise was by no means overwhelming. In fact, only three of the committee's eight members can be said to have been truly positive in their assessment. (Miyamoto Teru says in his remarks that there were two members strongly in favor and six who were more or less willing to go along. Takagi Nobuko and Kōno Taeko seem to be the two members Miyamoto has in mind, although judging solely from his published comments, Kuroi Senji might also be included in the "positive" camp.) Ishihara Shintarō and Murakami Ryū expressed the strongest doubts, the former repeating what has become his standard mantra about a lack of thematic ambition and an inadequate attention to proper fictional form, the latter complaining that the candidates were all merely producing fiction that seems to have been "traced" from an existing pattern (nazoru is the word he uses). Both Yamada Amy and Ikezawa Natsuki also weighed in heavily against the limited thematic range and narrow narrative perspective to be found in all the shortlisted works.
On a strictly technical level, the structural patterning of Tossed Out onto the August Road does seem rather mechanical, and the use of kemurizume as the central thematic device is notably heavy-handed. It hardly seems necessary to point out as well the overly neat coincidence of August 31 being in some sense the "last day" for both Satō and Muzushiro, with September 1 (Satō's birthday) either promising a fresh start or -- especially in Satō's case -- serving to hammer the final nail into the coffin (the reader is told that Chieko asked Satō to registered their marriage on September 1, and that she has also asked him to submit the application for their divorce on the same date). And while Kōno Taeko, for example, claims that Itō's use of the third person in the story is successful, I think that the narrative is flawed in spots precisely because Itō fails to maintain a necessary distance between author and narrator. It is perhaps a sign of Itō's skill as a writer that the narrator's responsibility for the failure of his marriage is not glossed over in the story. Still, one can't help agreeing with Ishihara, Murakami, and Yamada that few of the recent Akutagawa Prize winners seem able to rise much above the quotidian. Must "pure" Japanese fiction really always be so narrowly constricted in scope?
136th Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2006
Hitoribiyori (On My Own) by Aoyama Nanae
A story that centers on the relationship between a young woman, aged 20, and the 71-year-old widow -- a distant relative -- who temporarily takes her in when the woman moves to Tokyo from Saitama Prefecture in an attempt to establish her independence. The action takes place over the course of a single calendar year, with the names of the seasons serving as chapter titles (beginning with spring, with a short "pre-spring" chapter added as a sort of epilogue). The young woman, whose name is Mita Chizu, has rejected her divorced mother's advice to go to college and instead finds part-time work as a "companion," serving drinks and attention to male partygoers. The elderly widow, named Ogino Ginko, lives in a rather dilapidated house that stands next to the platform of Chōfu station (I haven't yet seen it mentioned elsewhere, but Ogino's name is a direct borrowing of the name of Japan's first licensed female physician [dates: 1851-1913], who happens to have been born in what is now the city of Kumagaya, Aoyama's hometown). We follow Mita through two unsuccessful love affairs, her sometimes tense relationship with her mother (visiting China on a teacher-exchange program for most of the story), and her emotional development as she emerges into adulthood. This emotional growth is deeply informed by her relationship with Ogino, although that influence is never made to seem obtrusive and Ogino is portrayed as an individual with an inner life that Mita knows she can never fully be party to. At the end of her year in Ogino's house, Mita accepts the offer of a full-time job, moves into the company's dormitory, and starts a romantic liaison with a married man who works in the same office she does. As a clear sign that Mita has learned one of life's ambiguous lessons, she returns to Ogino the various small items she has stolen from the old woman since her arrival, and also disperses the complete collection of other personal articles she has stolen from people over the years by squirreling them away behind the numerous photographs of Ogino's previous pet cats that gaze down from the walls of the room in which Mita lives.
The ending of the story might therefore be characterized as programmatic, and, as one of the selection-committee members (Kōno Taeko) noted, some light trimming may have been advisable in the latter half of the story. Still, Aoyama is quite assured in her style -- the descriptive power of which Ishihara Shintarō praised lavishly, comparing it to impact made by the opening scene of Murakami Ryū's Kagiri naku tōmei ni chikai buruu (Almost Transparent Blue) -- she has an astonishing skill for effectively portraying the personality of a character not herself given to psychological introspection (Mita's habit of stealing small objects from people she knows, for instance, is never fully explored but is all the more compelling for that very reason), and she deals with serious topics -- the difference between youth and age, the solitude involved in growing up -- with a refreshing lightness of touch that does not diminish the significance of the topics themselves. The presence of such composure in so young a writer (at 23, Aoyama is the seventh-youngest Akutagawa Prize winner in history) is surely what prompted six of the eight members of the selection committee to support her for the award, including both Ishihara and Murakami, who have been notably critical of young writers in the past. The other four relatively unqualified supporters were Takagi Nobuko, Kuroi Senji, Miyamoto Teru, and Kōno Taeko. The lone dissenters were Ikezawa Natsuki, who, while acknowledging Aoyama's obvious skill, preferred a story by a writer he viewed as more willing to "break the mold" of established conventions, and Yamada Amy, who considered Hitoribiyori to be "boring" and "lacking in seriousness" -- the sort of diversion that would be enjoyed by a world-weary man who, on a day off, drowsily sips tea on the veranda of his home. I personally found Hitoribiyori to be much more engrossing than many other recent winners of the prize, and think the award was richly deserved. To my mind, the story is an impressive accomplishment.
137th Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2007
Asatte no otoko (A Distracted Man) by Suwa Tetsushi
"A Distracted Man" (more literally, "A Man with His Mind on the Day After Tomorrow") takes the form of a collage of reminiscences, diary entries, and philosophical speculation on the part the unnamed narrator about his uncle (whose name is Akira), and the possible reasons for the uncle's increasingly strange behavior and ultimate disappearance. The story is metafictional in the sense that the narrator starts by offering a "traditional" opening to a story about a character based on his uncle, who was known for blurting out incomprehensible words and expressions at inappropriate times (this "deviance" from the communicative norm is what gives the work its title). He then declares, however, that traditional narrative form is itself inappropriate to the task at hand, and he proceeds to present more objectively -- through diary entries, his own memories, and the accounts of his uncle's wife -- what he knows and has learned about his uncle's tenuous relationship with verbal reality. Here, too, however, the narrator is aware that principles of selection and ordering are at work, and that interpretive traps attend even this more direct approach. Furthermore, although he claims at the end of the story not to have brought it to a traditional conclusion, the narrator has most definitely returned to his starting point, giving the story a clear shape. The form of the story, in other words, itself seems intended to reflect the central problem of how to effect intelligible communication.
According to the narrator, Akira was a stutterer up to the time he entered college, a condition to which the narrator attributes his uncle's lifelong sense of disorientation. Although the stutter miraculously cleared up, the uncle's return to "normality" only seemed to increase his sense of dislocation, resulting (after his marriage) in the occasional use of meaningless comments and expletives such as ponpa, hoemyau, and taponteau. The narrator is able to track down the linguistic origin of at least one of these words, and he recounts a number of events that indicate Akira's sensitivity to the provisional relationship that obtains between pronunciation and the reality which words are assumed to represent. The uncle's attachment to reality became even more tenuous after his wife died in a traffic accident, causing him to isolate himself by moving into an apartment in a neglected danchi, where from his meaningless words he apparently devised a sort of private dance symbolizing the conflict between impersonal "will" (the narrator makes a reference to Schopenhauer) and personal agency. Akira then simply vanished, sending his older brother (the narrator's father) a postcard saying that he was going on a trip. The narrator finishes his account by summarizing the evidence he has managed to collect and noting that no further word has been received of his uncle, so that he can provide no satisfactory answer to the problem of his disappearance. But the suggestion that Akira has perhaps "broken through" to some ideal form of reality is strong, and the narrator appends a copy of a diagram of the danchi room in which Akira spent most of his time, implying that this map is meant to take the place of a verbal conclusion. In typical deconstructionist fashion, the appendix thus becomes the true focus of thematic interpretation, and the map functions effectively as both a diagram of the puppet stage and as a kind of Buddhist mandala.
Support for "A Distracted Man" was overwhelming, with six of the nine selection-committee members favoring Suwa for the prize. The two newest members, Ogawa Yōko and Kawakami Hiromi, were especially glowing in their praise, perhaps hinting at a slight shift in the committee's evaluative standards. Opposition was expressed first of all by the usual suspects: Ishihara Shintarō and Murakami Ryū. The former once again lamented the generally poor quality of all the candidates, pointing to the large number of eccentric titles as evidence of a lack of narrative responsibility. With regard to "A Distracted Man" specifically, Ishihara taxed Suwa with being needlessly obscure and relying too heavily upon non-narrative tricks like intertextual diagrams and a map tacked on to the end of the story. One takes Ishihara's point; still, it would appear that Ishihara has a major blind spot when it comes to the use of play in narrative (he would have despised Sterne), and he seems notably lacking in a sense humor. Ishihara's own insight as a critic seems quite restricted. Murakami complained, as is his wont, that the quality of the candidates was uniformly low and that it was a chore to read through all of them. He managed some kind words for one candidate, but not for Suwa, whose story, according to Murakami, was highly wrought stylistically but finally contained only the trite message that human communication is imperfect and life hard. Miyamoto Teru was the other dissenter, objecting to what he considered excessive intellectual play.
It is true that Suwa relies rather heavily on the ideas of the philosophers he seems to have encountered as a student (there is an epigraph from Antonin Artaud, whose Theater of Cruelty is thereby invoked, and explicit mention is made of Heinrich von Kleist in an apparent allusion to Kleist's essay "The Puppet Theater"). The story is perhaps a little too philosophical and metafictional for its own good. On the other hand, tying these philosophical ideas linguistically to the history of Japanese cultural interaction with the West (from the Doctrina Christa to the postcolonial writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o to an extraordinary phonetic rendition of Gilbert O'Sullivan's pop hit "Alone Again (Naturally)"), and then centering the story on the life of a modern Japanese afflicted with stuttering, produces a richly nuanced texture that gives the lie to Murakami's simplistic formulation of the theme. It has been a long time since I read an Akutagawa Prize story that actively encourages intellectual speculation, and one that moreover breathes new life into the dilemma of Japanese "modernity." The Akutagawa Prize this time seems to me to have been well earned.
138th Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2007
Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs) by Kawakami Mieko
This comparatively short story relates the short visit of an Osakan woman and her daughter to the Tokyo apartment of the woman's younger sister, who acts as the story's narrator. The older sister, Makiko, a divorced woman on the point of turning 40, has ostensibly come to Tokyo to receive breast-augmentation surgery. Her daughter, a sixth-grader named Midoriko, wonders why her mother would want to subject herself to such a potentially dangerous procedure, and is herself concerned about the prospect of starting menstruation, which most of her classmates have already done. Disgusted both by her mother's obsession with the size of her breasts and by the impending physical changes in her own body that signify an unwanted transition to adulthood, Midoriko has refused to speak for almost half a year, communicating instead by writing in a notebook. On the second day of her three-day visit, Makiko visits her former husband without telling her sister or daughter where she is going, and after she returns to the apartment late that night, Makiko and Midoriko engage in a dramatic egg-smashing confrontation, each breaking raw eggs over herself in a symbolic catharsis that has Midoriko regaining her voice to demand that her mother tell her the truth about her motivations, and Makiko replying that some things in life are simply not open to interpretation as the "truth."
The title -- "Breasts and Eggs" -- thus initially associates the former image with Makiko and the latter with Midoriko. But the mediation of the narrator and the final egg-breaking climax serve to implicate both images in the broader process of living life as a woman, with all the physical and psychological complications that this entails. Kawakami seems to be aiming at a comprehensive synthesis at the very end of the story, when the narrator, whose increasingly irregular period has begun, examines her own breasts in the bathroom mirror and characterizes them as lying halfway between funny and pathetic (nakiwarai no yō datta), thus gently reprising the comically melodramatic egg-smashing scene enacted by her sister and neice. It is a carefully structured story, told in a fluid style that makes effective use of the Kansai dialect, and allusions to Higuchi Ichiyō's classic "Growing Up" were quickly picked up on by readers (not only is "Midori," the name of Higuchi's famous protagonist, appropriated, but the aunt's nickname is "Nattchan," an echo of Higuchi's own real first name, Natsu). "Breasts and Eggs" is thus clearly a "gendered" story, but it comes with a lightly worn authenticity that ultimately proves quite compelling and is well attuned to the tone imparted by the Kansai dialect used for the narration.
The selection committee ended up strongly in favor of awarding Kawakami the prize, although it appears that another writer -- the Chinese-born Yan Ii (Yang Yi) -- had strong initial support. The problem with the 43-year-old Yan, who has lived in Japan for 21 years, was her perceived lack of skill with Japanese. Several committee members (including Ogawa Hiroko, Murakami Ryū, and Kuroi Senji) were prepared to accept linguistic deviations from "standard" Japanese as a valid expressive technique. Other members -- Miyamoto Teru, Ishihara Shintarō, and Yamada Amy, to name the most outspoken -- were much less forgiving, referring to Yan's Japanese as simply crude. In any case, Ikezawa Natsuki, Ogawa Yōko, Murakami Ryū, Kuroi Senji, Kawakami Hiromi, and Yamada Amy were firmly in the Kawakami camp, where they were joined perhaps somewhat less enthusiastically by Miyamoto Teru and Takagi Nobuko. The consensus seems to have been that Kawakami's storytelling talent combined with her stylistic skill made her the obvious choice. The only member adamantly opposed was Ishihara Shintarō, who once again railed against all of the nominated works on the grounds of superficiality, and who was especially critical of Yang's Japanese.
Ishihara is fair enough in pointing out that the mother-daughter conflict at the center of "Breasts and Eggs" does not seem especially fresh, and it is also true that Kawakami's stylistic panache tends to obscure such troubling practical questions as why Makiko should have to come to Tokyo for her surgery anyway (a point also made by Ishihara) and why the narrator should feels no qualms in secretly perusing her niece's notebook after she has fallen asleep. No doubt opinions will also vary over the effectiveness of the egg-smashing scene. But while Kawakami flirts with being trite on the one hand and overwrought on the other, on its own terms the story can surely be counted a success. "Breasts and Eggs" is deceptively easy to read, but the lasting impression it makes is due in no small measure to that very fact.
139th Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2008
Toki ga nijimu asa (A Morning Steeped in Time) by Yan Ii (Yang Yi)
The first story by a nonnative speaker of Japanese to win the Akutagawa Prize, "A Morning Steeped in Time" is the fairly straightforward account of a young man from rural China who enters college in 1989, becomes infected with the patriotic enthusiasm of the pro-democracy movement leading up to the Tiananmen Square incident of June 4, and -- expelled from school and disillusioned -- emigrates to Japan, where he becomes active in the expatriate community and ultimately seems to resign himself to life in his adopted home. The first six sections of the 10-section story follow the young man -- whose name is Ryō Kōen (names appear in the story in Japanese transcription) -- from the time he takes the university entrance examination (in July 1988) up to the point the next year when he and his best friend are imprisoned for fighting drunkenly over activist politics with two taxi drivers in a restaurant. Ryō, whose own father had been rusticated during the Cultural Revolution, is portrayed as an idealistic innocent who also finds a nonpolitical outlet for his romantic yearnings in the popular songs of Teresa Ten (Teresa Teng). As a freshman, Ryō falls under the charismatic influence of a professor of poetry (Kan Ryōshū) and becomes infatuated with Haku Eiro, the female leader of the university's student dissidents. This confluence of political idealism and romantic yearning, harnessed to an earnest patriotism, would seem to be the defining aspects of Ryō's character.
The last four sections of the story jump 10 years to the end of 1999 and bring the reader up to date on Ryō's life after his imprisonment, including his marriage in China to a woman from a Japanese "war orphan" family, his emigration to Japan, the births of a daughter and a son, and his ambivalent involvement in expatriate politics (protesting the selection of Beijing as a site for the 2008 Olympics, for example, and striking up a relationship with a well-known Chinese dissident living in exile in the United States, while at the same time being compelled to acknowledge his privileged status in Japan and having to face the reality that exiled Chinese dissidents have been effectively silenced). The story ends in December 2000 when Ryō briefly meets his former professor, Kan Ryōshū, who stops for a night in Japan on his way back to China in the company of Haku Eiro, who after her divorce from a Frenchman started living with Kan, along with her half-French son. The next morning, as the jet takes off for Beijing, Ryō's son Tamio asks where it is going, and Ryō answers, "To China, your father's furusato." Tamio asks Ryō the meaning of furusato, and Ryō replies that it means "home," to which Tamio responds that for him Japan is home.
The selection committee this time quite clearly took into consideration the fact that Yang is a Chinese resident of Japan writing in a second language, thus injecting a specifically nonliterary (or perhaps quasi-literary) element into the selection process. Those who expressed support for Yang (Takagi Nobuko, Ikezawa Natsuki, Kawakami Hiroko, and Kuroi Senji, with Ogawa Yōko and Yamada Amy along for the ride) seemed to base their support on Ryō's appeal as a character, the story's cultural-political theme, and the related impression that Yang had "something important" to say. Those opposed (Ishihara Shintarō, Murakami Ryū, and Miyamoto Teru) cast doubt on the extent to which Yang's style can be considered fluent, and questioned whether she had in fact seriously explored her topic (Ishihara detected some stylistic improvement over Yang's previous story, "Wan-chan," but Murakami flatly refused to acknowledge any such progress). I confess that I find both Ryō's character and the theme to be relatively superficial, and agree with Murakami that the main character's "purity" and earnestness are not enough to constitute a convincing treatment of the post-Tiananmen Chinese diaspora (the facile ending is representative in this respect). Yang's Japanese certainly seems competent enough, but there is a discordantly colloquial note at times, and (as Yamada complained) the metaphors can seem rather overdone. The choice of Yang may perhaps be called a conscientious one intended to give due recognition to the implications -- cultural, thematic, and stylistic -- of fiction by writers working in a second language, but conscientiousness is not necessarily the most significant indication of literary worth.
140th Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2008
Potosuraimu no fune (The Lime Pothos Boat) by Tsumura Kikuko
"The Lime Pothos Boat" traces the inner life of the central character, Nagase Yukiko, as she approaches and then passes the milestone age of 30. Nagase is a line worker in a cosmetics factory who has quit a previous job because of "moral harassment" by a superior, and she has spent four years working to achieve full-time contract status at the factory. Her annual take-home pay amounts to about $16,000, and she supplements this income by working after hours in a former college classmate's coffee shop and by tutoring seniors in how to use a PC. The plot centers on Nagase's plan -- inspired by a poster at her factory -- to save up enough money in the course of a year to take a round-the-world cruise on an NGO-sponsored passenger liner, an amount equivalent to her net annual salary. As Nagase diligently keeps track of her expenses in a notebook she always carries with her, we follow the developments in her relationships with her mother, the line boss at the factory, and three of her college friends (including the one who runs the coffee shop). These relationships, all with women, provide a convincing depiction of the life of a modern working Japanese woman Nagase's (much of the story is autobiographical in nature; the unexplained "moral harassment" of this story was in fact the subject of an earlier short story by Tsumura, who has referred in interviews to the harassment she experienced in her first full-time job). Nagase eventually succeeds in saving up the desired sum, and the final scene is of her imagining the islander boy from the cruise poster waving to her from his outrigger canoe.
Although the story thus serves as a authentic portrayal of working-class life for a modern Japanese woman, it is not simply an exercise in slice-of-life realism. The title suggests an underlying allegorical impulse based on two related thematic motifs: first, the image of hardy lime-pothos plants, which Nagase raises at the dilapidated house she shares with her long-divorced mother; and second, the outrigger canoe from the poster, which reappears in a dream Nagase has in which she uses the canoe to distribute pathos plants to the islanders she visits. Pothos plants have no practical benefits (Nagase spends a great deal of time trying to find out whether or not the leaves are edible only to learn that they are not), and even in Nagase's dream, one group of islanders refuses the plants because the island has no fresh water, the single nutrient needed by the plant to grow. An element of futility is clearly implied. At the same time, Nagase receives as a present a set of pothos drawings from the daughter of one of her college friends, a girl often absorbed in admiring the illustrations of reptiles and amphibians in a pictorial encyclopedia. There is clearly a certain unsentimental sense of self-reliant romanticism at work as well. Pothos plants can thus be taken to represent both Nagase's hopes and the existential emptiness of those hopes, an ambivalent circumstance that nevertheless does not lead to despair (at least not permanent despair).
Tsumura enjoyed strong support from the selection committee, with Murakami Ryū expressing the least enthusiasm, complaining that although "The Lime Pothos Boat" was an accomplished story, it did not reveal the essential authorial need to "control the uncontrollable." (One often gets the impression that members of the selection committee look for themselves in the work of others.) Ogawa Yōko was in favor of a different story, but briefly acknowledged that Tsumura would no doubt continue to write in the future, apparently accepting this as a sign of promise. The other members were generally positive, with even Ishihara Shintarō saying that the other candidates for the prize paled by comparison (still, he considered Tsumura's story to be restricted in scope and would rather have waited until her next effort). Yamada Amy offered perhaps the most interesting remark when she noted that on the basis of relevance, young readers would be better off reading Tsumura's story than Kobayashi Takiji's The Cannery Boat, which has undergone a minor national sales boom at bookstores recently, presumably because of Japan's current economic situation. It is a point well taken.
141st Akutagawa Prize, first half of 2009
Tsui no sumika (A Final Home) by Isozaki Ken'ichirō
"A Final Home" deals in a telescoped -- and occasionally fantastic -- manner with the relationship between the unnamed narrator and his second wife over a period of some 20 years, beginning from about the time they both turn 30. The marriage comes on the heels of failed relationships for both, and the pair appear to have been brought together less by passion than a shared awareness of closing possibilities and a growing sense of world-weariness. After the marriage, the narrator's wife reveals a manic-depressive side that, after the birth of a daughter, results in the couple's not exchanging a word for 11 years. The narrator, alternately feeling trapped in his marriage (and by life) and compulsively attracted to certain other women, engages in a string of affairs that only comes to an end one morning when he has an epiphany on the train from his home to the pharmaceutical company where he works. The narrator has recently been instrumental in enabling the company to expand its market share even in the depressed economy of the 1990s, and now, in his late 40s, he suddenly feels the self-satisfaction of successful middle age. When he arrives home that evening, the narrator declares that he has decided to build a family house, an announcement that prompts his wife to break her long silence and respond that, yes, it was time for that to happen. The house takes almost three years to complete because of delays in finding the perfect materials, but once it is complete the narrator takes pleasure in watching the setting sun from one of the second-floor windows.
Two years after the house is built, at the age of 50, the narrator is sent to America to deal with a problem involving an important business partner, a problem that ultimately takes nearly a year and a half to resolve but seems to renew the narrator's sense of purpose. Upon returning to Japan, he finds that his daughter has left for the United States (the reason is unspecified), where he has just spent so much time as a business "combatant." The story ends with the narrator taking his wife by the shoulders and gazing into her eyes, realizing that they remain the same people they were 20 years earlier--each a mirror image of the other, and who will now spend the remainder of their days together in the same house.
Although Yamada Amy, in announcing "A Final Home" as the winner, pointed to strong support for Isozaki's story, the comments published by selection-committee members in Bungei Shunjū suggest a division of five "for" and four "against." The former group would include Yamada, Ogawa Yōko, Kuroi Senji, Kawakami Hiromi, and Ikezawa Natsuki. The treatment of time and the skillful use of neurosis to explore the role of the irrational in human motivation seem to have been deciding factors here. Ishihara Shintarō (a perennial killjoy), Takagi Nobuko, Miyamoto Teru, and Murakami Ryū found the portrayal of the main character to be too transparent, unconvincing, or unmemorable. I tend to agree with the supporters and find the inexplicable disjunctions between external convention and internal desire to be well suited to constructing the personality of the narrator. One might perhaps point to a certain similarity with Tsumura Kikuko's "The Lime Pothos Boat," while also acknowledging that Isozaki's version of reconciling the dreamy with the real does seem to be attended by intellectual trappings in a way that "The Lime Pothos Boat" is not. More puzzling to me is the conceit that one essentially reaches the end of life's road at the age of 51 (in the last line of the story, the narrator states that he does not expect his wife or him to have much longer to live). It introduces a note of inauthenticity into what is otherwise a satisfying portrayal of the perceived unreality of the transition from the end of disappointed youth to a more stable -- if in some ways unfulfilled -- middle age.
142nd Akutagawa Prize, second half of 2009