Every year, France, Japan, Brazil and more crown their best book. Spin the globe to see which ones you can read in English, and which are still waiting.
4,667 books · 44 prizes · 39 countries
Akutagawa 2026 (first half) · Winner
Zonbi kaishūfu
Title translated by AI:“The Zombie Collector”
Chito Kosagawa · 36 when first published
Novel · 156 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Jobless along with her husband in a world taken over by AI, a woman who has always been a good girl takes up a strange new role and carries it out diligently, unthanked.
Akutagawa 2026 (first half) · Candidate
Anchi guddomōningu
Title translated by AI:“Anti Good Morning”
Emi Yagi · 38 when first published
Novel · 179 pages · Satire, Speculative
AI-generated summary:Hounded by work notifications until she has lost herself, a woman can suddenly no longer sleep, and her quest for rest, against an employer that imposes well-being, a husband who preaches a mindful life and a suspect online coach, takes her into a strange world.
Akutagawa 2026 (first half) · Candidate
Magokoro
Title translated by AI:“Sincerity”
Ren Nishina · 32 when first published
Novel · 181 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:To fulfil his master's dream of designing a museum, Ren, an architect's assistant, works to clear residents from a derelict, unfinished tower block in China so it can become a gallery, as the ambitions of a tycoon's daughter and of the flat owners collide.
Akutagawa 2026 (first half) · Candidate
Warui chi
Title translated by AI:“Bad Blood”
Suzumi Suzuki · 43 when first published
Novel · 127 pages
AI-generated summary:A woman who has always lived as she pleased receives sudden news about her body, and as she walks to the clinic in jewelled sandals to reclaim a blood sample, her past wrongs come back to her one by one.
Akutagawa 2026 (first half) · Candidate
Soritia ojisan ga ita koro
Title translated by AI:“Back When Solitaire Man Was Around”
Yu Murashi · 47 when first published
Novel · 133 pages
AI-generated summary:One winter morning, a woman who works for a miso maker in Kyoto hears that Mr Kuronoda, the colleague she secretly called 'Solitaire Man', has died in a fire, and after attending his wake she makes a decision about a drifting relationship and a job going nowhere.
Akutagawa 2025 (second half) · Winner
Toki no ie
Title translated by AI:“The House of Time”
Makoto Toriyama · 33 when first published
Novel · 139 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:As a young man sketches every surface of an old house, the lives, recollections and emotions of the three generations who called it home resurface.
Akutagawa 2025 (second half) · Winner
Sakebi
Title translated by AI:“Scream”
Ushio Hatakeyama · 33 when first published
Novel · 135 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Hikaru Hayano, humbled by a man he calls 'Teacher', delves into ancient dotaku bells and the past of an Osaka district that once grew vast poppy fields, where a young man before the war dreamed of Manchuria and the 2600th-anniversary expo, in a tale that runs from Manchukuo to the Kansai Expo.
Akutagawa 2025 (first half) · Candidate
Torajekutorī
Title translated by AI:“Trajectory”
Gregory Khezrnejat · 41 when first published
Novella · 172 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Brandon, an American teaching English in Japan, uses transcripts from the first moon landing in lessons with his older pupil Kawamura, and a curious bond forms between a man who fled America and one who once dreamed of it.
Akutagawa 2025 (first half) · Candidate
Tori no yume no baai
Title translated by AI:“In the Case of a Bird's Dream”
Junya Komada · 30 when first published
Novel · 148 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a share house where Hatsuse lives with Hasumi and a Java sparrow, Hasumi asks, lightly, to be killed because he has already died, and Hatsuse, pressing an ear to his chest, finds that his heart really has stopped.
Akutagawa 2025 (first half) · Candidate
Odore, ai yori itai hō e
Title translated by AI:“Dance Toward What Hurts More Than Love”
Kujira Sakisaka · 31 when first published
Novel · 129 pages
AI-generated summary:Anno, who 'cracks' whenever things don't make sense to her, distrusts love.
Akutagawa 2025 (first half) · Candidate
Taemanai hikari no tashizan
Title translated by AI:“The Endless Addition of Light”
Noreko Hibino · 22 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Under a park clock tower nicknamed 'the monster', three young people with no home to go back to meet: Sono, who took a beauty-clinic advert as a sign and now eats flowers, Hug, who embraces strangers to belong to everyone, and Hiromegu, a novice pick-up artist.
Akutagawa 2025 (second half) · Candidate
Kaigara kōro
Title translated by AI:“The Shell Island Route”
Hiroki Kuzu · 38 when first published
Novella · 114 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Raised by a fisherman father within sight of the Russian-held islands, a woman has married a musician with Ainu roots and moved to Kushiro; when he leaves home without a word, she remembers Kaigara Island, which she once saw with her father.
Akutagawa 2025 (second half) · Candidate
Hebi
Title translated by AI:“Snake”
Kaoru Sakasaki · 41 when first published
Novel
Akutagawa 2025 (second half) · Candidate
Wan Sakamoto · 26 when first published
Novella · 110 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:An sorts parcels on a conveyor belt at a delivery depot among faceless workers, and after he glimpses what is inside one box, boxes start to vanish one after another.
Akutagawa 2024 (first half) · Winner
Sanshōuo no shijūkunichi
Title translated by AI:“The Salamander's Forty-Nine Days”
Aki Asahina · 43 when first published
Novel · 141 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Two sisters share a single body; others see one woman, but each feels the other beside her and wonders who she is.
Akutagawa 2024 (first half) · Winner
Bari sankō
Title translated by AI:“Off-Trail Climbing”
K Sanzo Matsunaga · 44 when first published
Novel · 161 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:Two years after joining a firm that repairs the exteriors of old buildings, Hata, who avoids office socialising, joins colleagues on a hike up Mount Rokko, and then learns that Meka, a loner veteran seen as odd, goes 'bari' climbing, deliberately straying off the trails.
Akutagawa 2024 (second half) · Winner
Gēte wa subete o itta
Title translated by AI:“Goethe Said It All”
Yui Suzuki · 23 when first published
Novel · 188 pages
AI-generated summary:Over dinner with his family, the celebrated Goethe scholar Toitsu Hiroba comes across a line attributed to Goethe that he has never seen, printed on a teabag label, and combs the collected works and his own decades of study to trace it.
Akutagawa 2024 (first half) · Candidate
Kaigan dōri
Title translated by AI:“Seaside Road”
Kaoru Sakasaki · 40 when first published
Novella · 124 pages
AI-generated summary:Kuzumi, an agency cleaner at Kirara-en, a care home by the sea, gets to know Maria, a co-worker from Uganda, a workshy ex-colleague, and Mrs Sato, a resident who sits daily beside a dummy stop waiting for a bus that never arrives.
Akutagawa 2024 (first half) · Candidate
Inaku naku naranaku naranaide
Title translated by AI:“Don't Not Not Go Away”
Kujira Sakisaka · 30 when first published
Novel · 161 pages
AI-generated summary:Tokiko is overjoyed when her best friend Asahi, whom she believed dead, phones her out of the blue after four years, but when Asahi, who says she has no address, comes to stay, she gradually settles into the house for good.
Akutagawa 2024 (first half) · Candidate
Ten no koe
Title translated by AI:“The Resold Voice”
Sekaikan Ozaki · 40 when first published
Novel · 162 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Ute Inai, frontman of the band GiCCHO, has finally appeared on live television when his voice begins to fail, and worrying how to keep the band in demand, he is tempted by a charismatic ticket tout called Esseken to 'resell' himself.
Akutagawa 2024 (second half) · Candidate
Ji suberi
Title translated by AI:“Slipping Characters”
Novel
Akutagawa 2024 (second half) · Candidate
Dansu
Title translated by AI:“Dance”
Yuko Takenaka · 42 when first published
Novella · 120 pages
AI-generated summary:Irritated at having to cover for three colleagues in her section who keep calling in sick, a young woman learns from one of them, the older Ms Shimomura, about the love triangle among the three, and is dragged along in Shimomura's wake.
Akutagawa 2024 (second half) · Candidate
Nijūshigo
Title translated by AI:“Twenty-Four or Five”
Yusuke Norishiro · 38 when first published
Novel · 109 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Two years after moving out, a young novelist in her mid-twenties travels to Sendai for her brother's wedding, retracing signs of an aunt lost five years ago whose love for her still catches her off guard.
Akutagawa 2023 (first half) · Winner
ハンチバック · Hanchibakku
Saou Ichikawa · 44 when first published
Novella · 112 pages
AI-generated summary:Shaka Izawa, whose spine curves so sharply it squeezes one lung, sends words out into the world from her room in the care home she inherited, writing clickbait and erotica online and tweeting that she wants to be reborn as a high-class sex worker, until a carer discovers her account.
Akutagawa 2023 (second half) · Winner
東京都同情塔 · Tōkyōto dōjōtō
Rie Qudan · 33 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:In an alternative Japan where Zaha Hadid's national stadium was built and tolerance has become dogma, the architect Sara Makina, who cannot bring herself to be lenient toward criminals, competes to design Sympathy Tower Tokyo, a new high-rise prison for 'people deserving sympathy'.
Akutagawa 2023 (first half) · Candidate
Ameko Kodama · 30 when first published
Novel · 161 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Yukina, who was a child gravure idol, now loses herself in fan fiction based on a boys' manga, reading it with the space for the heroine's name left blank, while others call her past part of society's dark side.
Akutagawa 2023 (first half) · Candidate
Waga te no taiyō
Title translated by AI:“The Sun in My Hands”
Kaho Ishida · 32 when first published
Novel · 140 pages
AI-generated summary:Ito, a welder respected by everyone on the construction sites for his mastery of the fire that melts steel, suddenly falls into a slump, and as his skill and pride drain away he cannot win them back through practice.
Akutagawa 2023 (first half) · Candidate
Erekutorikku
Title translated by AI:“Electric”
Masaya Chiba · 45 when first published
Novel · 164 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:In Utsunomiya in 1995, Tatsuya, a teenager who dreams of Tokyo, gets online early on at the urging of his father, an adman who builds amplifiers in his home studio, and timidly reaches out to the gay community he finds there.
Akutagawa 2023 (first half) · Candidate
Sore wa makoto
Title translated by AI:“That's Sincere”
Yusuke Norishiro · 37 when first published
Novel · 177 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:On a school trip to Tokyo, seventeen-year-old Makoto Sada spends the free day with the odd seven-person group he has been assigned to, secretly hoping to visit the uncle he loved and was separated from, in a small adventure kept from the teachers.
Akutagawa 2023 (second half) · Candidate
Saru no taikanshiki
Title translated by AI:“The Ape's Coronation”
Chito Kosagawa · 33 when first published
Novel · 140 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Shifumi, shut away at home since an incident, spots her 'big sister' on a television screen and goes to the zoo, where she meets Shineno, a bonobo once trained in language, and finds their souls falling into step.
Akutagawa 2023 (second half) · Candidate
Meisaishoku no otoko
Title translated by AI:“The Man in Camouflage”
Jose Ando · 29 when first published
Novel · 163 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:The narrator met Ibuki in a blue-lit underground 'fight club' in Tokyo; when Ibuki is found beaten and covered in blood, the narrator tracks the 'man in camouflage' who appears to be behind the attack, through pleasure, fear, discrimination and violence.
Akutagawa 2023 (second half) · Candidate
Megumi Kawano · 32 when first published
Novel · 139 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Masago, a trans girl who played the Little Mermaid in her high-school drama club's adaptation, freed for once from the 'male' she was assigned, has since given up trying to live as a girl, and when the old cast wants to restage the play years later, she refuses the lead.
Akutagawa 2023 (second half) · Candidate
Aisuneruwaizen
Mina Miki · 32 when first published
Novel · 215 pages
AI-generated summary:Kotone Taguchi, a thirty-two-year-old piano teacher whose work and relationship have both been going badly, gets back in touch with an old friend, and their reunion sends things somewhere she never expected.
Akutagawa 2022 (first half) · Winner
おいしいごはんが食べられますように · Oishii gohan ga taberaremasu yō ni
Junko Takase · 34 when first published
Novel · 132 pages · Love, Satire
AI-generated summary:At an office in Saitama, Nitani, who cares nothing for food, starts dating Ashikawa, the fragile colleague everyone protects, who bakes sweets for the office, while Oshio, hardworking and fed up with Ashikawa, suggests to Nitani that they be mean to her together.
Akutagawa 2022 (second half) · Winner
Arechi no kazoku
Title translated by AI:“Families of the Wasteland”
Atsushi Sato · 40 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Yuji Sakai, forty, a gardener who lost every tool to the disaster more than a decade ago and then his wife to sickness, drives his body hard at work, struggles to reach his son and keeps asking why she died while he lived.
Akutagawa 2022 (second half) · Winner
Kono yo no yorokobi yo
Title translated by AI:“O Joy of This World”
Iko Idogawa · 35 when first published
Novella · 135 pages
AI-generated summary:At the funeral-clothes counter of the mall she visited with her little girls years ago, a woman, addressed as 'you', befriends a girl who hangs around the food court.
Akutagawa 2022 (first half) · Candidate
Akira Toshimori · 28 when first published
Novella · 114 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Madoka, a high-school girl dating Umi for a few months and keeping her weight under forty kilos, chafes at well-meant clichés while she looks for someone truly irreplaceable.
Akutagawa 2022 (first half) · Candidate
Kateiyō anshin kōfu
Title translated by AI:“A Reassuring Miner for the Home”
Chito Kosagawa · 32 when first published
Novel · 125 pages · Speculative, Family
AI-generated summary:Konami, a housewife uneasy in her calm marriage, finds a sticker from her childhood home on a pillar in Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi, and soon Tsutomu, a miner mannequin at an old mine theme park her mother always told her was her father, starts appearing all around her in Tokyo.
Akutagawa 2022 (first half) · Candidate
Akutē
Title translated by AI:“Cursing”
Hiroka Yamashita · 28 when first published
Novel · 174 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Yume, nineteen and determined to write, lives with her mother and a spiteful grandmother of ninety, venting every frustration in curses.
Akutagawa 2022 (first half) · Candidate
ギフテッド · Gifuteddo
Suzumi Suzuki · 39 when first published
Novella · 120 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A bar hostess living in a block on the fringe of a red-light district nurses her gravely ill mother, a single parent and failed poet, and in the shadow of death keeps thinking of a friend who recently killed herself.
Akutagawa 2022 (second half) · Candidate
Kaikonchi
Title translated by AI:“Cleared Land”
Gregory Khezrnejat · 38 when first published
Novella · 90 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Back from studying in Japan, Russell returns to South Carolina, to a yard choked with kudzu, sticky Southern heat and mournful music, and reflects on the life of his father, who emigrated there from Iran.
Akutagawa 2022 (second half) · Candidate
ジャクソンひとり · Jakuson hitori
Jose Ando · 28 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Jackson, a mixed-race Black Japanese man employed as a physio at a sportswear company's gym, is assumed by everyone to be the naked man in a porn clip linked from a QR code on his T-shirt, and in looking into it he meets three others who each claim the clip shows them.
Akutagawa 2022 (second half) · Candidate
Gureisuresu
Suzumi Suzuki · 39 when first published
Novella · 122 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Mizuki does make-up for actresses in adult films, and goes home to her grandmother in an ornate Western-style house in the woods, crossing daily between two worlds that could not be further apart.
Akutagawa 2021 (first half) · Winner
Higanbana ga saku shima
Title translated by AI:“The Island Where Spider Lilies Bloom”
Li Kotomi · 32 when first published
Novel · 188 pages · Speculative, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A girl who has lost her memory washes up on a beach of red spider lilies and is named Umi, 'from the sea', by Yona, a local girl, on an island ruled by priestesses where two languages are spoken, one of them taught only to women.
Akutagawa 2021 (first half) · Winner
貝に続く場所にて · Kai ni tsuzuku basho nite
Mai Ishizawa · 41 when first published
Novel · 145 pages
AI-generated summary:In Göttingen, a German university town under the shadow of the pandemic, a Japanese woman is visited by a friend lost in the 2011 tsunami nine years before, and the encounter starts to fold the town's memories into her own.
Akutagawa 2021 (second half) · Winner
Burakku bokkusu
Title translated by AI:“Black Box”
Bunji Sunakawa · 31 when first published
Novel · 161 pages
AI-generated summary:Sakuma, an ex-soldier of the Self-Defence Forces who now rides as a cycle courier through Tokyo, has long yearned to get far away and cannot understand why he can't stop his own outbursts of rage.
Akutagawa 2021 (first half) · Candidate
Mizutamari de iki o suru
Title translated by AI:“Breathing in a Puddle”
Junko Takase · 33 when first published
Novel · 136 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Itsumi notices her husband no longer bathes, complaining that tap water smells foul and irritates his skin; soon he steps out to stand in the rain, and when his odour becomes office gossip he resigns and they relocate to the town she grew up in, where he washes in the river every day.
Akutagawa 2021 (first half) · Candidate
Ōbā hīto
Title translated by AI:“Overheat”
Masaya Chiba · 43 when first published
Novel · 185 pages · Love, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A philosopher who has swapped Tokyo for Osaka and lectures in Kyoto drifts between language and men's bodies, missing his younger boyfriend and keeping company with his favourite bar, his tropical fish, his tweets and memories of a lost family home.
Akutagawa 2021 (first half) · Candidate
Tsurara no koe
Title translated by AI:“Voices of Icicles”
Rein Kudo · 27 when first published
Novel · 119 pages
AI-generated summary:Ichika was a second-year art-club student in Morioka when the 2011 earthquake struck, living in a stricken prefecture without counting herself a victim, and over the following ten years she and others slowly find words for what they went through.
Akutagawa 2021 (second half) · Candidate
On za puranetto
Title translated by AI:“On the Planet”
Daiki Shimaguchi · 23 when first published
Novel · 174 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Four young people share a car from Yokohama to the dunes of Tottori to make a film, and as they talk about their pasts on the way they start to wonder about memory, and whether the world has ended.
Akutagawa 2021 (second half) · Candidate
Waga tomo, Sumisu
Title translated by AI:“My Friend, Smith”
Kaho Ishida · 30 when first published
Novel · 139 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:U-no, an office worker who lifts weights wanting to 'become a different creature', is urged by O-shima at her gym to enter a bodybuilding contest, and finds that to place she must train not only muscle but 'femininity' too, while colleagues and her mother misread her efforts.
Akutagawa 2021 (second half) · Candidate
Schoolgirl
Rie Qudan · 31 when first published
Novella · 212 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A mother whose fourteen-year-old daughter, an eager social-issues YouTuber, pities her as 'a poor woman whose mind has been invaded by novels' is baffled when the girl's latest video turns out to be about Osamu Dazai's story 'Schoolgirl'.
Akutagawa 2021 (second half) · Candidate
Mina no arabashiri
Title translated by AI:“Everyone's First Pressing”
Yusuke Norishiro · 35 when first published
Novel · 133 pages · Historical, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A schoolboy from the history club encounters a shady middle-aged stranger at the site of Minagawa Castle, who grabs a list of books held by an old local household and singles out a title by Ozu Hisatari found in no other record, and the two investigate whether it is a lost book or a fake.
Akutagawa 2020 (first half) · Winner
Shuri no uma
Title translated by AI:“The Horse of Shuri”
Haneko Takayama · 45 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:Minako helps archive a tiny, ageing local museum in Okinawa and also works online as a 'question reader', quizzing isolated workers in remote corners of the world, until a Miyako pony strays into her world on a stormy night.
Akutagawa 2020 (first half) · Winner
Hakyoku
Title translated by AI:“Collapse”
Haruka Tono · 29 when first published
Novel · 141 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A final-year student who coaches younger rugby players and is about to look for a job meets Akari, a carefree freshman, at a comedy show a friend is in, and finds her more appealing than Mariko, his clever girlfriend since childhood.
Akutagawa 2020 (second half) · Winner
推し、燃ゆ · Oshi, moyu
Rin Usami · 21 when first published
Novella · 134 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Akari, a teenager who is failing at school, at home and at her part-time job, survives by pouring herself into understanding Masaki Ueno, the pop idol she follows, until word spreads that he has assaulted a fan and the internet turns on him.
Akutagawa 2020 (first half) · Candidate
Aua eiji
Manabu Okamoto · 48 when first published
Novel · 140 pages
Akutagawa 2020 (first half) · Candidate
Akai suna o keru
Title translated by AI:“Kicking the Red Sand”
Nen Ishihara · 48 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:After her mother Kyoko, a painter, dies, Chinatsu goes to Brazil in the company of Meiko, an old friend of Kyoko's who has just been widowed by her alcoholic husband.
Akutagawa 2020 (second half) · Candidate
Shōtai
Title translated by AI:“Platoon”
Bunji Sunakawa · 30 when first published
Novel · 157 pages · War, Speculative
AI-generated summary:When Russian forces land in Hokkaido and Japan faces its first ground war since 1945, Second Lieutenant Adachi of the Self-Defence Forces leads his platoon to meet them, through days of residents refusing to leave and intelligence that never comes, until the fighting begins.
Akutagawa 2020 (second half) · Candidate
Konjuji
Mitsuko Kizaki · 30 when first published
Novel · 163 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:Serena, eleven, left by her mother and molested by her father, falls in love before dawn on 2 September 1993 with Rian, a legendary dead rock star she glimpses on TV, and retreats into imagined scenes with him whenever the pain becomes unbearable.
Akutagawa 2020 (second half) · Candidate
Omokage
Title translated by AI:“Mother's Shadow”
Sekaikan Ozaki · 36 when first published
Novella · 124 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Friendless at primary school, a girl lies low in the massage parlour where her mother is employed, watching through a curtain as her mother 'repairs the broken parts' of clients and seems to hurt more each day.
Akutagawa 2020 (second half) · Candidate
旅する練習 · Tabisuru renshū
Yusuke Norishiro · 34 when first published
Novel · 184 pages · Coming of age, Nature
AI-generated summary:With her spring plans wiped out by the 2020 pandemic, a soccer-mad girl about to start secondary school walks with her novelist uncle beside the Tone River toward the Kashima Antlers' stadium, she kicking a ball, he writing.
Akutagawa 2019 (first half) · Winner
むらさきのスカートの女 · Murasaki no sukāto no onna
Natsuko Imamura · 39 when first published
Novel · 216 pages
AI-generated summary:Fixated on a local woman everyone calls the Woman in the Purple Skirt, the narrator schemes to get her hired at her own workplace so they can be friends.
Akutagawa 2019 (second half) · Winner
Seitaka awadachisō
Title translated by AI:“Tall Goldenrod”
Makoto Furukawa · 31 when first published
Novel · 143 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Nami Omura sulks about having to travel to an island off Nagasaki to cut the grass round the barn at her mother's empty family home, until the stories her relatives tell her on the way, of a clan that has long taken in people arriving from the sea, change her mind.
Akutagawa 2019 (first half) · Candidate
Kamu gyazā raundo pīpuru
Title translated by AI:“Come Gather Round People”
Haneko Takayama · 44 when first published
Novella · 108 pages
AI-generated summary:A woman recalls her grandmother's lovely back, a stranger who licked her stomach as she walked back from school and Nishida, a tedious friend from her teens; years later someone she meets during a downpour shows her footage of Nishida, wearing a dress, heading a protest march.
Akutagawa 2019 (first half) · Candidate
Itsutsu kazoereba mikazuki ga
Title translated by AI:“Count to Five and a Crescent Moon”
Li Kotomi · 30 when first published
Novella · 134 pages · Love, Migration
AI-generated summary:In the final summer of the Heisei era, a Taiwanese woman working in Japan sees her friend Mio again in Tokyo after five years apart; Mio married a Taiwanese man and moved to Taiwan, and the narrator has feelings she has never voiced.
Akutagawa 2019 (first half) · Candidate
Rakko no ie
Title translated by AI:“The Sea Otter House”
Makoto Furukawa · 31 when first published
Novella · 217 pages
AI-generated summary:An old woman whose sight is failing, and whose dreams and waking life constantly run together, laughs off the fears her own imagination once gave her.
Akutagawa 2019 (first half) · Candidate
Hyaku no yoru wa hanete
Title translated by AI:“A Hundred Nights Leap”
Noritoshi Furuichi · 34 when first published
Novel · 185 pages
AI-generated summary:A young man who cleans the windows of skyscrapers, listening to a voice in his head that says inequality runs sideways too, not just up and down, one day meets the eyes of an old woman behind the glass.
Akutagawa 2019 (second half) · Candidate
Deddorain
Title translated by AI:“Deadline”
Masaya Chiba · 41 when first published
Novel · 161 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In spring 2001 a gay student starts graduate work in contemporary French philosophy in Tokyo, and while he helps a friend make a film, drives through the night with his best friend and has chance encounters with men, his deadline for a thesis on Deleuze creeps closer.
Akutagawa 2019 (second half) · Candidate
Oto ni kiku
Title translated by AI:“Heard in Sound”
Nagara Takao · 27 when first published
Novel · 141 pages
AI-generated summary:In Vienna, a gifted teenage composer and her elder sister, who has left her native tongue behind, wrestle with words and sound.
Akutagawa 2019 (second half) · Candidate
Osanago no seisen
Title translated by AI:“A Small Child's Holy War”
Yusuke Kimura · 49 when first published
Novel · 219 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Disillusioned with Tokyo and with a new religion he almost believed in, Shiro returns to his home village and becomes a councillor, but blackmailed by a prefectural assemblyman he is forced to sabotage the mayoral campaign of his reformist childhood friend Jingo.
Akutagawa 2019 (second half) · Candidate
Saikō no ninmu
Title translated by AI:“The Finest Mission”
Yusuke Norishiro · 33 when first published
Novel · 183 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:About to graduate, a young woman rereads the childhood diary she kept in a notebook from her late aunt, and remembers her.
Akutagawa 2018 (first half) · Winner
Okuribi
Title translated by AI:“Sending-Off Fire”
Hiroki Takahashi · 39 when first published
Novel · 120 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Ayumu, a ninth-grader newly arrived from Tokyo in a Tohoku hill town, thinks he has blended into his tiny class, where Akira rules everything with hanafuda cards, until on a summer night Akira asks him along to a local custom of sending burning boats downriver.
Akutagawa 2018 (second half) · Winner
Ichi raundo ippun sanjūyonbyō
Title translated by AI:“1 Round, 1 Minute 34 Seconds”
Ryohei Machiya · 35 when first published
Novel · 140 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A twenty-one-year-old boxer who won his debut by a first-round knockout but has since lost three and drawn one, an overthinker tired of his own weakness, is dropped by his trainer and starts working with Umekichi, an eccentric active boxer new to coaching.
Akutagawa 2018 (second half) · Winner
Nimuroddo
Title translated by AI:“Nimrod”
Takahiro Ueda · 39 when first published
Novel · 136 pages · Speculative, Love
AI-generated summary:Satoshi Nakamoto, who mines virtual currency on his company's servers, his girlfriend Noriko Takubo, a securities worker haunted by an abortion and a divorce, and his colleague Jin Nimuro, nicknamed Nimrod, a failed novelist, drift toward a future in which everything can be replaced.
Akutagawa 2018 (first half) · Candidate
Kazashimo no aka
Title translated by AI:“Vermilion Downwind”
Natsuki Koyata · 37 when first published
Novella · 191 pages
AI-generated summary:A group of women join Yukimi in founding a baseball team meant to keep their souls healthy, and wrestle with the gap between ideals and reality.
Akutagawa 2018 (first half) · Candidate
Shiki
Title translated by AI:“Seasons”
Ryohei Machiya · 35 when first published
Novel · 172 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Hoshizaki, a high-school boy with no talents and no rebellious phase, learns a dance from a YouTube clip in a park after dark with his friend Kusano, while another friend, Tsukumo, who lives by the river, tells him he is about to be a father.
Akutagawa 2018 (first half) · Candidate
Mō 'hai' to shika ienai
Title translated by AI:“All I Can Say Now Is Yes”
Suzuki Matsuo · 56 when first published
Novel · 204 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Caught after a two-year affair and bound by his wife's terms of surrender, the playwright Goro Kaiba, who hates flying and fears foreigners, jumps at a dubious French prize that pays for a week in Paris, a trip that turns into a nightmare.
Akutagawa 2018 (first half) · Candidate
Utsukushii kao
Title translated by AI:“A Beautiful Face”
Yuko Hojo · 33 when first published
Novel · 152 pages
AI-generated summary:After a catastrophe of unheard-of scale, Sanae, a schoolgirl staying in a shelter with her little brother, is oddly elated by the swarm of reporters, though a place she must eventually go back to is waiting.
Akutagawa 2018 (second half) · Candidate
Senjō no Rebiyatan
Title translated by AI:“Leviathan on the Battlefield”
Bunji Sunakawa · 28 when first published
Novella · 161 pages · War
AI-generated summary:K, a Japanese who has signed on as an armed guard protecting a British oil plant in Iraq, rides north from Kirkuk toward Erbil and keeps asking himself why he came, what war is, what makes it and who the enemy really is.
Akutagawa 2018 (second half) · Candidate
Ita basho
Title translated by AI:“The Place Where We Were”
Haneko Takayama · 43 when first published
Novella · 163 pages · Love, Migration
AI-generated summary:A man and his wife Xiaocui, who first came to Japan as a trainee, set off together, map in hand, for a seaside town that the map does not show.
Akutagawa 2018 (second half) · Candidate
Heisei-kun, sayōnara
Title translated by AI:“Goodbye, Heisei-kun”
Noritoshi Furuichi · 33 when first published
Novel · 187 pages · Satire, Love
AI-generated summary:In a Japan where assisted death is legal, Heisei-kun, a cool, rational young man hailed in the press as the embodiment of the Heisei era and averse to physical intimacy, announces to his girlfriend Ai his wish to die when the era closes.
Akutagawa 2018 (second half) · Candidate
Jappu n rōru hīrō
Title translated by AI:“Jap'n'Roll Hero”
Rui Kounoike · 31 when first published
Novel · 152 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:A Keio student who can barely play claims to know Dantula Deo, an '80s band that made it abroad then vanished; when his guitarist friend posts 'recreated' songs online and lands a record deal, their game with a made-up band is drawn into a historic information war.
Akutagawa 2017 (first half) · Winner
Eiri
Title translated by AI:“In the Shadows”
Shinsuke Numata · 39 when first published
Novella · 94 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:Posted by his company to Iwate, Konno lets his guard down with only one person, his colleague Hiasa, a fishing and drinking companion who drifts away from him, and whose other face Konno glimpses only after the disaster of March 2011.
Akutagawa 2017 (second half) · Winner
Ora ora de hitori igumo
Title translated by AI:“I'll Go On Alone”
Chisako Wakatake · 63 when first published
Novel · 164 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Momoko, seventy-four and widowed, drinks tea alone in the suburban home of four decades, and voices speaking the dialect of her northern childhood start talking over one another in her head, carrying her back through fifty years.
Akutagawa 2017 (second half) · Winner
百年泥 · Hyakunen doro
Yuka Ishii · 54 when first published
Novel · 110 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Days after Chennai's worst flood in a hundred years, a Japanese woman who teaches Japanese to young programmers elbows across a packed bridge toward her office, through silt that has engulfed whisky bottles, a mummified mermaid, Expo '70 coins and memories that may belong to others.
Akutagawa 2017 (first half) · Candidate
Yojisugi no fune
Title translated by AI:“The Boat After Four”
Makoto Furukawa · 29 when first published
Novel · 120 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Living away from his island with a brother who cannot see, an unsettled Minoru recalls his grandmother's words.
Akutagawa 2017 (first half) · Candidate
Hoshi no ko
Title translated by AI:“Child of the Stars”
Natsuko Imamura · 37 when first published
Novel · 220 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Chihiro, a ninth-grader, was frail from birth, and her parents' frantic efforts to make her well led them into a dubious religion whose beliefs have slowly warped their household.
Akutagawa 2017 (first half) · Candidate
Mannaka no kodomotachi
Title translated by AI:“Children in the Middle”
Wen Yuju · 37 when first published
Novel · 163 pages · Coming of age, Migration
AI-generated summary:Kotoko, nineteen, the Japan-raised daughter of a Taiwanese mother, studies Mandarin in Shanghai and befriends two classmates who also straddle Japan, Taiwan and China, while 'standard' Chinese makes her feel anything but standard.
Akutagawa 2017 (second half) · Candidate
Yukiko-san no ashioto
Title translated by AI:“Yukiko's Footsteps”
Kumi Kimura · 41 when first published
Novel · 123 pages
AI-generated summary:Kaoru, visiting Tokyo for work, sees a newspaper item reporting that Yukiko, the landlady of the Koenji boarding house where he lived in his student years, died by herself in the summer heat, and as he walks back there after two decades, those years return.
Akutagawa 2017 (second half) · Candidate
Ai ga hasamiuchi
Title translated by AI:“Love in a Pincer”
Shiro Maeda · 40 when first published
Novel · 187 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Married six years, Kyoko, thirty-six, and Shunsuke, nearly forty, cannot have a child, and Shunsuke, who doubts that love exists but cannot let go of the idea of Kyoko becoming a mother, proposes a startling solution involving a second man.
Akutagawa 2017 (second half) · Candidate
Direi efekuto
Title translated by AI:“Delay Effect”
Yusuke Miyauchi · 38 when first published
Novella · 178 pages · Speculative, War
AI-generated summary:In a chaotic Tokyo of 2020, the wartime past has begun to overlap the present: the narrator's great-grandfather sits at a translucent low table inside his living room, and the air raid of 10 March 1945, in which his great-grandmother will burn to death, is drawing closer.
Akutagawa 2016 (first half) · Winner
コンビニ人間 · Konbini ningen
Sayaka Murata · 37 when first published
Novel · 163 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Keiko Furukura, thirty-six, single and never in a relationship, has worked part-time at the same convenience store for eighteen years and only feels she fits into the world as a clerk, until a new hire, Shiraha, tells her such a life is shameful.
Akutagawa 2016 (second half) · Winner
Shinsekai
Title translated by AI:“New World”
Sumito Yamashita · 50 when first published
Novel · 163 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Nineteen-year-old Sumito takes a boat north to join a drama school in a remote valley, where young would-be actors and writers live off the land under a playwright they call the Teacher, amid hard physical work, frictions and his feelings for girls at home and in the valley.
Akutagawa 2016 (first half) · Candidate
ジニのパズル · Jini no pazuru
Chesil · 31 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Coming of age, Migration, Politics
AI-generated summary:Facing expulsion from her Oregon high school, Jini, born in Japan to a Korean family, tells Stephanie, whom she meets through her homestay, about Tokyo five years before, when she enrolled at a pro-North Korean school without speaking Korean.
Akutagawa 2016 (first half) · Candidate
Tanzaku nagashi
Title translated by AI:“Floating Wishes Downstream”
Hiroki Takahashi · 37 when first published
Novella · 139 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A father can do nothing but keep watch as his young daughter lies close to death.
Akutagawa 2016 (first half) · Candidate
美しい距離 · Utsukushii kyori
Nao-Cola Yamazaki · 38 when first published
Novel · 144 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:When his wife, owner of a sandwich café and only in her early forties, learns she has incurable cancer, her husband, an employee of an insurer, spends every spare hour at her bedside, hoping she can finish her life on her own terms rather than the doctors'.
Akutagawa 2016 (first half) · Candidate
Ahiru
Title translated by AI:“The Duck”
Natsuko Imamura · 36 when first published
Novella · 140 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:After her family adopts a duck, local children start calling round after school, but when it gets sick and goes to the animal hospital they vanish, and the duck that comes home a fortnight later is noticeably smaller.
Akutagawa 2016 (second half) · Candidate
Kyapitaru
Title translated by AI:“Capital”
Hideyuki Kato · 33 when first published
Novel · 181 pages
AI-generated summary:On a year's leave earned through seven years of work, a man meets a woman who uses a wheelchair in Bangkok during a cold spell.
Akutagawa 2016 (second half) · Candidate
Nuwanba naran
Title translated by AI:“It Has to Be Sewn”
Makoto Furukawa · 28 when first published
Novel · 138 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Talking together, members of one fishing family from a small island off Nagasaki piece their scattered memories into the story of four generations.
Akutagawa 2016 (second half) · Candidate
Binīru gasa
Title translated by AI:“Plastic Umbrella”
Masahiko Kishi · 49 when first published
Novella · 124 pages
AI-generated summary:In a corner of Osaka, a poor young man and a poor young woman get by, lonely and uncertain of tomorrow.
Akutagawa 2016 (second half) · Candidate
Kābūru no sono
Title translated by AI:“The Garden of Kabul”
Yusuke Miyauchi · 37 when first published
Novella · 206 pages · Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:Rei, a Japanese American in her late thirties who co-founded a tech company and still carries the wounds of childhood bullying and a hard relationship with her mother, is sent on leave and finds herself driving to Manzanar, the camp in which her grandparents were held.
Akutagawa 2015 (first half) · Winner
Sukurappu ando birudo
Keisuke Hada · 30 when first published
Novel · 121 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Kento, twenty-eight, jobless and preparing for an exam, lives with his mother and his eighty-seven-year-old grandfather, whose constant refrain is that he longs to die, and decides to help him on his way by smothering him with care.
Akutagawa 2015 (first half) · Winner
火花 · Hibana
Naoki Matayoshi · 35 when first published
Novel · 160 pages
AI-generated summary:Tokunaga, an unknown young comedian, falls under the spell of Kamiya, an older comic with a wholly original idea of humour, after meeting him at Atami's fireworks, and the two spend years arguing about what makes people laugh.
Akutagawa 2015 (second half) · Winner
異類婚姻譚 · Irui kon'intan
Yukiko Motoya · 36 when first published
Novella · 209 pages · Satire, Speculative
AI-generated summary:A childless housewife who neither works nor wants for anything realises one day that her face has come to look exactly like her husband's, a man who wants to think about nothing at home and has become obsessed with deep-frying.
Akutagawa 2015 (second half) · Winner
Shinde inai mono
Title translated by AI:“Those Not Dead”
Yusho Takiguchi · 33 when first published
Novel · 144 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:On an autumn day about thirty descendants, from children to great-grandchildren, assemble to keep vigil over an old man who has died full of years, and through the night each one's musings on mortality and recollections of the clan drift and overlap.
Akutagawa 2015 (first half) · Candidate
Asagao no hi
Title translated by AI:“Morning Glory Day”
Hiroki Takahashi · 36 when first published
Novel · 123 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Rinta keeps visiting Saki, the wife he has known since childhood, while she convalesces from tuberculosis; as she weakens the couple are told not to speak at all, so that her throat can heal, and one day he glimpses in her eyes something no living person should hold.
Akutagawa 2015 (first half) · Candidate
Emu to shiguma
Title translated by AI:“M and Sigma”
Novel · 196 pages
Akutagawa 2015 (first half) · Candidate
Natsu no saidan
Title translated by AI:“Summer Shredding”
Rio Shimamoto · 32 when first published
Novel · 125 pages
AI-generated summary:Novelist Chihiro, who carries a sexual wound from her past, is tormented by Shibata, a devilish editor, until she stabs his hand with a fork at a party; to recover she goes to her late grandfather's old house in Kamakura and begins cutting up his books to scan them.
Akutagawa 2015 (first half) · Candidate
Jimi Hendorikusu ekusuperiensu
Title translated by AI:“The Jimi Hendrix Experience”
Yusho Takiguchi · 33 when first published
Novella · 119 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A teenage romance, a scooter journey across Tohoku and the sound of Hendrix: one man's recollections of the decade from autumn 2001 to spring 2011 change shape with every retelling, as his nineteen-year-old self and the man he became briefly meet.
Akutagawa 2015 (second half) · Candidate
Shea
Hideyuki Kato · 32 when first published
Novella · 181 pages
Akutagawa 2015 (second half) · Candidate
Ie e
Title translated by AI:“Homeward”
Sen Ishida · 47 when first published
Novel · 197 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Shin, studying sculpture as a graduate student in Tokyo, was raised on the Niigata coast by his mother and the man she lives with unmarried, whom he calls Grandpa, while keeping close ties with his real father on an island, until the arrangement begins to trouble him.
Akutagawa 2015 (second half) · Candidate
Ikyō no yūjin
Title translated by AI:“A Friend in a Foreign Land”
Takahiro Ueda · 36 when first published
Novel · 156 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A cult on Awaji Island, where Japan's creator gods first made the land, wins converts after foretelling the Kobe earthquake, and a band of brilliant hackers from the US west coast arrives to see its leader, observed by an all-seeing narrator.
Akutagawa 2015 (second half) · Candidate
Homo sapiensu no shunkan
Title translated by AI:“The Homo Sapiens Moment”
Taro Matsunami · 33 when first published
Novella · 124 pages · War
AI-generated summary:An acupuncturist who gives weekly massage sessions at a care home works on the badly knotted neck of an old resident, and as the stiffness loosens, memories of the Sino-Japanese War surface.
Akutagawa 2014 (first half) · Winner
春の庭 · Haru no niwa
Tomoka Shibasaki · 41 when first published
Novel · 154 pages
AI-generated summary:Taro, a recently divorced former hairdresser living in a soon-to-be-demolished apartment block in Setagaya, Tokyo, sees a neighbour climbing the fence into the garden next door and learns why she is obsessed with the pale-blue house there.
Akutagawa 2014 (second half) · Winner
Kyūnenmae no inori
Title translated by AI:“A Prayer Nine Years Ago”
Masatsugu Ono · 44 when first published
Novel · 221 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Sanae, a thirty-five-year-old single mother, returns with her small son Kebin to the little seaside village where she grew up, and as she struggles with his fits she recalls something an older woman, Mitchan-nee, said nine years earlier.
Akutagawa 2014 (first half) · Candidate
Doro ni yaito
Title translated by AI:“Moxa on Mud”
Akito Inui · 43 when first published
Novella · 148 pages
AI-generated summary:Inheriting his late father's trade as a pedlar of a cure-all moxa, a man follows the old customer list to a remote hamlet on the Japan Sea coast, misses the last bus out and must spend the night in a place that may not let him go.
Akutagawa 2014 (first half) · Candidate
Madamu Kyurī to chōshoku o
Title translated by AI:“Breakfast with Madame Curie”
Erika Kobayashi · 36 when first published
Novel · 181 pages · Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:A stray cat that has wandered to a city in the east perceives radiation as light, and Hina, a girl whose birth coincided with the 2011 disaster, comes from women who hear it as sound; together they roam across time and place through the story of energy, from Marie Curie to Edison.
Akutagawa 2014 (first half) · Candidate
Metamorufoshisu
Title translated by AI:“Metamorphosis”
Keisuke Hada · 29 when first published
Novella · 202 pages
AI-generated summary:A highly paid broker who spends his days pushing investments on old people kneels each night before a dominatrix at an S&M club, and keeps craving harsher play in search of a world visible only to someone who has surrendered completely.
Akutagawa 2014 (first half) · Candidate
Wagahai wa neko ni naru
Title translated by AI:“I Am Becoming a Cat”
Yuta Yokoyama · 33 when first published
Novella · 135 pages · Satire, Migration
AI-generated summary:Kakeru, the son of a Japanese and a Chinese parent, lazes away his days far from his family in Shanghai, until a visa renewal sends him to Japan, where he winds up in Akihabara, the mecca of otaku culture.
Akutagawa 2014 (second half) · Candidate
Nue no ita ie
Title translated by AI:“The House Where the Nue Lived”
Atsushi Koyano · 52 when first published
Novel · 124 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:A man looks back with loathing on his father, an ex-artisan with a screw loose, as the old man dies a wretched death, and tracing where his hatred began, he also finds things to love in him.
Akutagawa 2014 (second half) · Candidate
指の骨 · Yubi no hone
Hiroki Takahashi · 35 when first published
Novel · 123 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Injured fighting in the South Pacific, a young soldier ends up in a temporary field hospital on an embattled island, where he barters with islanders for food and is given the finger bone of a friend killed by disease as a keepsake.
Akutagawa 2014 (second half) · Candidate
Kagehime
Nagara Takao · 22 when first published
Novel · 122 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Kagehime, a Mononobe priestess who takes the form of a kingfisher to listen for the gods in the forest, falls for Shibi, a man of the rival Heguri clan, though the crown prince has already sought her hand, in a tale drawn from the Nihon Shoki.
Akutagawa 2014 (second half) · Candidate
Wakusei
Title translated by AI:“Planet”
Takahiro Ueda · 35 when first published
Novel · 229 pages
Akutagawa 2013 (first half) · Winner
爪と目 · Tsume to me
Kaori Fujino · 33 when first published
Novella · 144 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:After a three-year-old girl's mother dies, her father proposes to a woman he met at the eye doctor's, where she came with an eye scratched by a contact lens, and the child narrates, addressing her as 'you', the uneasy household that forms.
Akutagawa 2013 (second half) · Winner
穴 · Ana
Hiroko Oyamada · 30 when first published
Novel · 92 pages
AI-generated summary:Having left her job to live in her husband's rural hometown, a young wife chases a strange black animal one sweltering day and tumbles into a hole in the riverbank as deep as her chest, and the people around her begin to seem odd.
Akutagawa 2013 (first half) · Candidate
Suppon shinjū
Title translated by AI:“Snapping Turtle Suicide Pact”
Akito Inui · 42 when first published
Novella · 123 pages
AI-generated summary:Tano, who has always let things slide rather than change anything, and Momo, cheerfully unfazed though she keeps getting hurt, meet by Shinobazu Pond and set out together from Ueno toward Lake Kasumigaura.
Akutagawa 2013 (first half) · Candidate
Sunamawari
Title translated by AI:“Ringside Sand”
Kenkichi Tsurukawa · 32 when first published
Novella · 125 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A boy who clips every sumo article down to the gossip and skips homework for the broadcasts accepts that he will never be big enough to wrestle and becomes a gyoji, a ring referee, in a sumo stable, living a youth of sand and sweat.
Akutagawa 2013 (first half) · Candidate
Sōzō rajio
Title translated by AI:“Imagination Radio”
Seiko Ito · 52 when first published
Novel · 193 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:At 2:46 in the morning, perched in a cedar above a small coastal town, DJ Arc begins a radio show broadcast on the waves of imagination, which only the listener's mind can pick up, in a story set after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Akutagawa 2013 (first half) · Candidate
Sabaku dansu
Title translated by AI:“Desert Dance”
Sumito Yamashita · 47 when first published
Novella · 127 pages
AI-generated summary:After seeing a desert on television, a man from the snowy north flies to an old American casino town, rents a car and drives into the desert, where he meets himself as a child, his dead parents and the woman from his local bar he never dared invite along.
Akutagawa 2013 (second half) · Candidate
さようなら、オレンジ · Sayōnara, orenji
Kei Iwaki · 42 when first published
Novel · 135 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:In a small Australian country town, Salima, an African refugee abandoned by her husband, raises two sons while working in a meat-processing plant and starts learning English at a vocational school, where she meets a Japanese woman she calls 'Hedgehog'.
Akutagawa 2013 (second half) · Candidate
Hana ni hasamiuchi
Title translated by AI:“A Pincer Attack on the Nose”
Seiko Ito · 52 when first published
Novella · 168 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:At the foot of Hijiri Bridge in Ochanomizu, a strange man in a mask makes a passionate speech about Gogol's 'The Nose' and Meisei Goto's novel 'Pincer Attack', and as the passers-by, all masked too, listen, reality begins to warp.
Akutagawa 2013 (second half) · Candidate
Korubatontori
Sumito Yamashita · 47 when first published
Novella · 107 pages
AI-generated summary:With his father in hospital and his mother killed by a car, a boy lives with his aunt, scarred long ago by oil his mother threw from a window, and on a visit to his father he meets delinquents, a fawn-like girl, a keeper of the moon and his parents as children.
Akutagawa 2013 (second half) · Candidate
Taro Matsunami · 31 when first published
Novel · 258 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Yutaka Nekoki, thirty-one, a layabout who in his head reigns over a kingdom of endless idleness, must face real life when his partner Takarada tells him she is pregnant, and after the birth their child turns out to have a congenital disability.
Akutagawa 2012 (first half) · Winner
冥土めぐり · Meido meguri
Maki Kashimada · 36 when first published
Novella · 138 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Natsuko, who escaped a mother and brother still clinging to the family's lost wealth and running up debts, travels with her husband Taichi, now in a wheelchair with an incurable illness, to the seaside hotel that once stood for her family's glory.
Akutagawa 2012 (second half) · Winner
ab sango
Natsuko Kuroda · 75 when first published
Novella · 47 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In fragments of memory, the story follows a sole daughter growing up in a bookish Showa-era home with two libraries and a little spiral-shaped room, from her earliest years until she sees her parents to their graves.
Akutagawa 2012 (first half) · Candidate
Hi'
Akito Inui · 41 when first published
Novel · 125 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:The narrator's uncle Hissan, once a yakuza apprentice, a fugitive in the Philippines, a club waiter and a hit songwriter, now lives as a recluse on a peninsula; drifting through life himself, the narrator wanders India and Nepal and comes home no wiser.
Akutagawa 2012 (first half) · Candidate
Tanpen gobōsei
Title translated by AI:“A Pentagram of Stories”
Otaro Maijo · 39 when first published
Short stories · 187 pages
AI-generated summary:Five stories, among them one about a man of twenty-seven who suddenly becomes obsessed with miscarriage and rages at how often babies die for no reason.
Akutagawa 2012 (first half) · Candidate
Gitchon
Sumito Yamashita · 46 when first published
Novella · 230 pages
AI-generated summary:A man who has become homeless in his forties sees his childhood friend Gitchon and his lonely father pass before his eyes, in a life told out of order from boisterous boyhood to old age.
Akutagawa 2012 (first half) · Candidate
Kappa nisshi
Title translated by AI:“Kappa Diary”
Yoshinori Suzuki · 38 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2012 (second half) · Candidate
獅子渡り鼻 · Shishiwataribana
Masatsugu Ono · 42 when first published
Novel · 128 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:Ten-year-old Takeru, abandoned with his brother, who cannot speak or move, in a cramped city flat when their mother vanishes, is taken to the coastal backwater she always hated, where its landscape, its grown-ups and its spirits slowly mend him.
Akutagawa 2012 (second half) · Candidate
Kantō heiya
Title translated by AI:“The Kanto Plain”
Michio Kitano · 28 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2012 (second half) · Candidate
Nikukotsucha
Title translated by AI:“Bak Kut Teh”
Nagara Takao · 20 when first published
Novella · 123 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Akaiko, a painfully thin schoolgirl, gives her mother the slip while travelling in Southeast Asia and hides at her friend Zooey's holiday home, to escape food that she feels piling up inside her as fat.
Akutagawa 2012 (second half) · Candidate
Oishii shawāheddo
Title translated by AI:“The Delicious Showerhead”
Otaro Maijo · 39 when first published
Novella · 445 pages
Akutagawa 2011 (second half) · Winner
共喰い · Tomogui
Shinya Tanaka · 39 when first published
Novella · 81 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In a small riverside town, seventeen-year-old Toma, dating Chigusa, a neighbour a year older whom he has known all his life, shares a home with his father and Kotoko, the father's woman, insisting to himself that he is nothing like the man who hits her during sex.
Akutagawa 2011 (second half) · Winner
道化師の蝶 · Dōkeshi no chō
Toh EnJoe · 39 when first published
Novella · 112 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Abrams, a rich businessman cast as a clown in a novel written in Latino sine flexione, spends lavishly hunting for its author, the elusive polyglot Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, who keeps moving on and leaving manuscripts behind in each local language.
Akutagawa 2011 (first half) · Candidate
Pinzoro
Title translated by AI:“Snake Eyes”
Akito Inui · 40 when first published
Novella · 146 pages
AI-generated summary:Caught up in a crooked dice game at the Tori-no-ichi fair in Asakusa, a scriptwriter drifts, as if steered by the dice, to a run-down hot-spring town, where he ends up as the warm-up act at a seedy strip theatre and lives with an old shamisen player and her granddaughter.
Akutagawa 2011 (first half) · Candidate
Niki no kutsujoku
Title translated by AI:“Niki's Humiliation”
Nao-Cola Yamazaki · 33 when first published
Novel · 155 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young man becomes the assistant of Niki, a celebrated photographer a year younger than him, and is ordered about at work and in private by the haughty woman he finds himself falling for.
Akutagawa 2011 (first half) · Candidate
Kanro
Title translated by AI:“Nectar”
Ryo Mizuhara · 22 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2011 (first half) · Candidate
Amerikamura
Sen Ishida · 43 when first published
Novella · 170 pages
AI-generated summary:Travelling to Osaka to escape her fear that her illness will return, Michiko suddenly feels her body fail, and finds herself thinking of a young man she had always disliked, a friend bent on an elite business career.
Akutagawa 2011 (first half) · Candidate
Kore wa pen desu
Title translated by AI:“This Is a Pen”
Toh EnJoe · 39 when first published
Novella · 173 pages · Speculative, Family
AI-generated summary:A university student keeps receiving strange letters from her uncle, who seems to have made a fortune from a program that writes text by itself, and his messages arrive not only by hand but as engraved magnets, typeballs and DNA sequences.
Akutagawa 2011 (first half) · Candidate
Nurui doku
Title translated by AI:“Lukewarm Poison”
Yukiko Motoya · 32 when first published
Novel · 133 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:One night a stranger who claims to be an old classmate phones a nineteen-year-old woman; she knows at once he is a heartless liar, yet his lies enthral her and begin a five-year private war between them.
Akutagawa 2011 (second half) · Candidate
Shichigatsu no baka
Title translated by AI:“The July Fool”
Maya Yoshii · 33 when first published
Novel
Akutagawa 2011 (second half) · Candidate
Machinaka
Title translated by AI:“In Town”
Naoki Hirokoji · 39 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2011 (second half) · Candidate
Kinari no kumo
Title translated by AI:“Unbleached Clouds”
Sen Ishida · 43 when first published
Novel · 210 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Having lost a love that mattered to her and with it the will to live, Samiko slowly finds her way back, starting with an avocado stone sprouting in water and through the residents of her old apartment block and the women at her knitting class.
Akutagawa 2010 (first half) · Winner
Otome no mikkoku
Title translated by AI:“The Maidens' Betrayal”
Akiko Akazome · 36 when first published
Novella · 121 pages
AI-generated summary:Students at a Kyoto college of languages are drilled by the eccentric Professor Bachmann to recite a passage from Anne Frank's diary in German for a speech contest, until an ugly rumour about him and one of the young women begins to circulate.
Akutagawa 2010 (second half) · Winner
Kueki ressha
Title translated by AI:“Train of Hard Labour”
Kenta Nishimura · 43 when first published
Novella · 147 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In the mid-1980s, nineteen-year-old Kanta Kitamachi, a middle-school leaver with no friends and no girlfriend, scrapes by on day labour at the docks and spends his wages on drink and brothels, until a cheerful new co-worker enters his life.
Akutagawa 2010 (second half) · Winner
Kikotowa
Mariko Asabuki · 26 when first published
Novel · 141 pages
AI-generated summary:Kiko and Towako shared childhood summers in a house above the sea at Hayama until those days were suddenly cut short; twenty-five years later, with the place due for demolition, they meet again.
Akutagawa 2010 (first half) · Candidate
Sono akatsuki no nurusa
Title translated by AI:“The Lukewarmness of That Dawn”
Maki Kashimada · 34 when first published
Novella · 146 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Keeping secret the loss of 'that man', a nursery-school teacher relives the lovely memories of their affair while she goes out drinking with co-workers and joins their bragging and chatter about romance.
Akutagawa 2010 (first half) · Candidate
Uchi ni kaerō
Title translated by AI:“Let's Go Home”
Naoki Hirokoji · 38 when first published
Novella · 158 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A man who keeps house while his wife goes out to work handles childcare, cooking and the mothers at the park, until one day a woman he has befriended there nearly drags him into a double suicide.
Akutagawa 2010 (first half) · Candidate
Hakudō
Title translated by AI:“Heartbeat”
Shirin Nezammafi · 31 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2010 (first half) · Candidate
Harutūmu ni watashi wa inai
Title translated by AI:“I Am Not in Khartoum”
Tomoka Shibasaki · 37 when first published
Novella · 222 pages
Akutagawa 2010 (first half) · Candidate
Jiyū takasa H
Title translated by AI:“Free Height H”
Yosan Hotakawa · 35 when first published
Novella · 110 pages
AI-generated summary:In an abandoned spring factory in eastern Tokyo, a man sands timber and brushes it with persimmon tannin, while the old landlord, whose family firm prospered on stubbornness, and other visitors drift in and out, their lives slowly linking through the building.
Akutagawa 2010 (second half) · Candidate
Boshiryō mae
Title translated by AI:“In Front of the Mother-and-Child Home”
Atsushi Koyano · 48 when first published
Novel · 166 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:After one phone call brings news of his beloved mother's lung cancer, a man spends her last year moving her between hospitals, fighting with doctors and family, and locked in a ferocious struggle with the father he calls 'the Nue'.
Akutagawa 2010 (second half) · Candidate
Daisankisō no sakana
Title translated by AI:“Fish of the Tertiary Strata”
Shinya Tanaka · 38 when first published
Novella · 140 pages
Akutagawa 2010 (second half) · Candidate
Aburabire
Title translated by AI:“Adipose Fin”
Yosan Hotakawa · 35 when first published
Novel
Akutagawa 2009 (first half) · Winner
Tsui no sumika
Title translated by AI:“The Final Home”
Kenichiro Isozaki · 44 when first published
Novella · 142 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:Two people who drifted together after long, failed romances in their twenties marry past thirty, and after a shaky, formless start the wife at one point stops speaking to her husband, for eleven years.
Akutagawa 2009 (first half) · Candidate
Mazui sūpu
Title translated by AI:“Bad Soup”
Akito Inui · 38 when first published
Novella · 191 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Father walks out saying he is off to the sauna and never returns, leaving a foul soup made from fish he bought at Ameyoko; Mother takes to the bottle and the narrator's family teeters toward collapse, in a plight that keeps tipping into comedy.
Akutagawa 2009 (first half) · Candidate
Ikenie
Title translated by AI:“The Sacrifice”
Kaori Fujino · 29 when first published
Novella · 186 pages
Akutagawa 2009 (first half) · Candidate
Shiroi kami
Title translated by AI:“White Paper”
Shirin Nezammafi · 30 when first published
Novella · 150 pages · Love, War
AI-generated summary:Two teenagers at school in a small Iranian town fall into a tentative first love while the war with Iraq goes on.
Akutagawa 2009 (first half) · Candidate
Yomogi gakuen kōtō gakkō shūkyūbu
Title translated by AI:“Yomogi Academy High School Football Club”
Taro Matsunami · 27 when first published
Novella · 209 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:At a private school that accepts teenagers who had stopped attending class, the woman coaching the hopeless football team is determined that her players win just one match, convinced it will give them strength for the rest of their lives.
Akutagawa 2009 (first half) · Candidate
Ano ko no kangaeru koto wa hen
Title translated by AI:“That Girl Has Strange Ideas”
Yukiko Motoya · 30 when first published
Novel · 139 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A twenty-three-year-old part-timer whose whole identity rests on her G-cup breasts shares a flat with a twenty-three-year-old virgin convinced she smells, who obsesses over dioxins from the waste plant, and together the two misfits get through their lonely days.
Akutagawa 2009 (second half) · Candidate
Bōdā & resu
Izumi Fujishiro · 27 when first published
Novel · 156 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:A young man in his first year at a company befriends Song-u, a Zainichi Korean colleague with an unusual charm, and learns that an invisible divide runs even between the two of them.
Akutagawa 2009 (second half) · Candidate
Mīto za bīto
Keisuke Hada · 24 when first published
Novel · 156 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In a provincial city an hour from Tokyo, a nineteen-year-old student preparing for university exams while working shifts is handed a used Honda Beat by a friend, and the little car reshapes his days, down to an uneasy relationship with a call girl.
Akutagawa 2009 (second half) · Candidate
Inu wa itsumo ashimoto ni ite
Title translated by AI:“The Dog Is Always at My Feet”
Novel · 146 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Pestered by a clingy classmate named Sada, a middle-school boy sometimes takes the big black dog his divorced father left behind to a secret spot deep in the bushes, where a reeking, unidentifiable piece of 'meat' lies buried.
Akutagawa 2009 (second half) · Candidate
Bitchi magunetto
Otaro Maijo · 36 when first published
Novel · 206 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Kaori and her younger brother Tomonori share everything; their father has walked out to live with his lover Hana, their mother is sinking, and then Tomonori's girlfriend Akari Miwa arrives to rock their fragile balance.
Akutagawa 2009 (second half) · Candidate
Rōjin tobaku
Title translated by AI:“Old Man Gambling”
Suzuki Matsuo · 47 when first published
Novel · 204 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Kenzo Kaneko, a masseur whose only comfort is comedy films, becomes the disciple of a director and joins a shoot in a shuttered shopping arcade in Kitakyushu, where the bored crew start betting on how often their seventy-eight-year-old lead will fluff his lines.
Akutagawa 2008 (first half) · Winner
Toki ga nijimu asa
Title translated by AI:“A Morning Blurred by Time”
Yang Yi · 44 when first published
Novel · 150 pages · Politics, Coming of age, Migration
AI-generated summary:Two close friends from a small Chinese village, Liang Haoyuan and Xie Zhiqiang, enter university in 1988 full of ambition, join the movement for democracy and are expelled after Tiananmen, and their lives are followed until just before Beijing hosts the Olympics.
Akutagawa 2008 (second half) · Winner
Potosuraimu no fune
Title translated by AI:“The Pothos Lime Boat”
Kikuko Tsumura · 30 when first published
Novella · 186 pages
AI-generated summary:Nagase, twenty-nine, juggles a factory contract and several side jobs, and when she sees that a voyage around the globe costs 1.63 million yen, exactly what the factory pays her in a year, she begins to save.
Akutagawa 2008 (first half) · Candidate
Hashiru
Title translated by AI:“Run”
Keisuke Hada · 23 when first published
Novel · 156 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A second-year high-school student rides an old green Bianchi from the shed to school, then skips class and keeps pedalling north on Route 4, through Fukushima, Yamagata, Akita and Aomori, texting lies to everyone at home.
Akutagawa 2008 (first half) · Candidate
Me to taiyō
Title translated by AI:“Eyes and Sun”
Kenichiro Isozaki · 43 when first published
Novella · 118 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A man remembers the days he spent with Tori, a woman whose large eyes pierce him.
Akutagawa 2008 (first half) · Candidate
Konrei, sōrei, sonota
Title translated by AI:“Weddings, Funerals, and So On”
Kikuko Tsumura · 30 when first published
Novella · 148 pages
AI-generated summary:Office worker Yoshino, who is forever being roped into other people's events, is halfway through a college friend's wedding, after-party duties and all, when she is summoned to her boss's father's wake, still hungry.
Akutagawa 2008 (first half) · Candidate
Gesshoku no hi
Title translated by AI:“The Day of the Lunar Eclipse”
Kumi Kimura · 32 when first published
Novella · 159 pages
AI-generated summary:The people around a young man who is completely blind, among them a friend whose relationship with him is delicate, are portrayed through rapidly shifting points of view.
Akutagawa 2008 (first half) · Candidate
Maikuro basu
Title translated by AI:“Microbus”
Masatsugu Ono · 38 when first published
Novel · 220 pages
AI-generated summary:A mute youth drives a bus round and round a jagged stretch of coast, as though sewing the world shut, in a tale of a place and the memories of those who live there.
Akutagawa 2008 (first half) · Candidate
ct no fukai kawa no machi
Title translated by AI:“The Town of ct's Deep River”
Yoshihisa Okazaki · 40 when first published
Novella · 109 pages
AI-generated summary:Sick of everything, a man of forty retreats to the drab suburb where he grew up and where no one expects him, and takes a job driving slowly for a firm called Noble Transport in a mock-aristocratic uniform.
Akutagawa 2008 (second half) · Candidate
Fusei na shori
Title translated by AI:“Illegal Operation”
Kiyotaka Yoshihara · 38 when first published
Novella · 122 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Makoto, a lonely boy raised by his mother on a housing estate and absorbed in his computer, meets Kuga at the estate's lookout, and in high school the two set out to build a computer game together.
Akutagawa 2008 (second half) · Candidate
Onna no niwa
Title translated by AI:“The Women's Garden”
Maki Kashimada · 32 when first published
Novella · 154 pages
AI-generated summary:A childless housewife sits in on her neighbours' gossip though she never fits in, until something quietly miraculous happens.
Akutagawa 2008 (second half) · Candidate
Te
Title translated by AI:“Hands”
Nao-Cola Yamazaki · 30 when first published
Novella · 159 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A twenty-five-year-old woman who compiles TV listings and runs a blog collecting photos of older men's faces and fingers drifts between a colleague she sleeps with but does not date and a boss thirty years her senior she dates but does not sleep with.
Akutagawa 2008 (second half) · Candidate
Kamisama no inai Nihon shirīzu
Title translated by AI:“A Japan Series Without God”
Shinya Tanaka · 36 when first published
Novel · 157 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In 1986, a boy whose father vanished after trouble over baseball gambling gets a postcard from him telling him to play baseball, and is torn between that wish and his mother's hatred of the game while he rehearses a play with a classmate he idolises.
Akutagawa 2008 (second half) · Candidate
Kaigyoku
Title translated by AI:“Crushed Balls”
Wataru Sumitani · 36 when first published
Novella · 158 pages
AI-generated summary:Aoki, a law-firm clerk, is stopped in a station underpass by two girls dressed as schoolgirls, hauled into a car park, held down and kicked between the legs, and soon he is following them in search of more.
Akutagawa 2007 (first half) · Winner
Asatte no hito
Title translated by AI:“The Day-After-Tomorrow Man”
Tetsushi Suwa · 38 when first published
Novel · 189 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:To understand the young uncle who vanished after years of eccentric behaviour, a man who, estranged from ordinary speech by his stammer, sought to live in the 'day after tomorrow', the narrator sets out to write a novel about him.
Akutagawa 2007 (second half) · Winner
Chichi to ran
Title translated by AI:“Breasts and Eggs”
Mieko Kawakami · 31 when first published
Novella · 138 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:For three summer days, the narrator in Tokyo hosts her older sister Makiko, a hostess from Osaka obsessed with getting breast implants, and Makiko's daughter Midoriko, who refuses to speak and talks only through her notebook.
Akutagawa 2007 (first half) · Candidate
Watakushiritsu in hā, mata wa sekai
Title translated by AI:“My Ego Ratio in Teeth, or the World”
Mieko Kawakami · 31 when first published
Novella · 133 pages
AI-generated summary:Convinced that people think not with their brains but with their teeth, specifically her own exceptionally healthy molars, a young woman becomes a dental assistant, thinks of her boyfriend Aoki and writes a diary to her unborn child.
Akutagawa 2007 (first half) · Candidate
Gurēto seikatsu adobenchā
Title translated by AI:“Great Life Adventure”
Shiro Maeda · 30 when first published
Novella · 157 pages
AI-generated summary:A jobless thirty-year-old who has moved in with Kanako, a supermarket cashier on the edge of Tokyo, spends his days levelling up in a video game and wondering whether he should really go on and defeat the Demon King.
Akutagawa 2007 (first half) · Candidate
Obu za bēsubōru
Toh EnJoe · 35 when first published
Novella · 153 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Fowles is a dull little town where, about once a year, a person drops out of the heavens; a drifter who washes up there joins its rescue squad, issued with baseball uniforms and bats.
Akutagawa 2007 (first half) · Candidate
Shudaika
Title translated by AI:“Theme Song”
Tomoka Shibasaki · 34 when first published
Novella · 189 pages
AI-generated summary:Mika, who loves to talk about pretty girls with her colleagues and lingers over a gravure magazine's guide to sexy actresses, thinks about where her art-school friends' lives are heading and hosts a café for women only in her home.
Akutagawa 2007 (first half) · Candidate
Aura aura
Yukiko Matsui · 40 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2007 (second half) · Candidate
Kozeni o kazoeru
Title translated by AI:“Counting Small Change”
Kenta Nishimura · 40 when first published
Novella · 177 pages · Autofiction, Love
AI-generated summary:A man who has never had luck with women at last finds one who loves him back, but his rages and his fists put their life together under strain, and their quarrels over money turn into a tragicomedy.
Akutagawa 2007 (second half) · Candidate
Kasōsuki no yukue
Title translated by AI:“Where Pretend Love Leads”
Kikuko Tsumura · 29 when first published
Novella · 145 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Exiled to a suburban warehouse because of a colleague's affair, Irie, twenty-eight and unattached, tries to make her dreary days bearable by supposing she has fallen for Morikawa, a single man she works with.
Akutagawa 2007 (second half) · Candidate
Katsura biyōshitsu besshitsu
Title translated by AI:“Katsura Beauty Salon Annexe”
Nao-Cola Yamazaki · 29 when first published
Novel · 153 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:At a hair salon run by Kozo Katsura, a manager who wears a wig, Junnosuke and Eri meet and become friends, in a feeling much like the start of love that may be something else, among the salon's other regulars.
Akutagawa 2007 (second half) · Candidate
Kireta kusari
Title translated by AI:“The Broken Chain”
Shinya Tanaka · 35 when first published
Novella · 146 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a town facing the straits, Umeyo, last daughter of the old Sakurai family that once turned the fishing village into a concrete city, lives with her divorced daughter and granddaughter, nursing a hatred for the Korean church built beside their decaying house.
Akutagawa 2007 (second half) · Candidate
Sora de utau
Title translated by AI:“Singing in the Sky”
Tomoyuki Nakayama · 32 when first published
Novella · 202 pages
AI-generated summary:A married man secretly takes a trip with his brother's girlfriend, adrift in a solitude of his own.
Akutagawa 2007 (second half) · Candidate
Wanchan
Yang Yi · 43 when first published
Novella · 146 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Fed up with her womanising first husband, Wang Aiqin, a tireless Chinese woman known as Wan-chan, marries into a family in rural Shikoku through an arranged match, looks after her mother-in-law and runs matchmaking tours to China for local bachelors.
Akutagawa 2006 (first half) · Winner
Hachigatsu no rojō ni suteru
Title translated by AI:“Thrown Away on an August Street”
Takami Ito · 35 when first published
Novella · 122 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:On a sweltering August day, Atsushi, whose divorce takes effect when he turns thirty, recounts the collapse of his marriage to his workmate Ms Mizuki as their truck makes the rounds of vending machines.
Akutagawa 2006 (second half) · Winner
ひとり日和 · Hitori biyori
Nanae Aoyama · 23 when first published
Novel · 150 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Twenty-year-old Chizu moves in with seventy-one-year-old Ginko and her two cats in a little house beside a railway platform, and through the seasons serves at a station stall, finds a boyfriend and watches Ginko's own love affair.
Akutagawa 2006 (first half) · Candidate
Nanbāwan konsutorakushon
Maki Kashimada · 30 when first published
Novel · 157 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young professor of architectural history, the would-be novelist who becomes his disciple, the girl the professor loves without hope and her beautiful fiancé, who rules her cruelly, talk of eternity, love and art among a modern city's celebrated buildings.
Akutagawa 2006 (first half) · Candidate
Tenmetsu
Title translated by AI:“Blinking”
Masaya Nakahara · 36 when first published
Novella · 243 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A silver box whose three coloured lights flicker can now carry any story in its patterns, so the narrator sets out to tell a happy tale with it.
Akutagawa 2006 (first half) · Candidate
Ōkina kuma ga kuru mae ni, oyasumi
Title translated by AI:“Goodnight, Before the Big Bear Comes”
Rio Shimamoto · 23 when first published
Novella · 201 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Almost half a year after moving in with Teppei, a young woman feels not so much happy as uneasy, as though she has pushed off in a vessel that could overturn, until a petty argument brings out his violence.
Akutagawa 2006 (first half) · Candidate
生きてるだけで、愛。 · Ikiteru dake de, ai
Yukiko Motoya · 27 when first published
Novella · 112 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Yasuko, twenty-five, sleeps too much and swings between highs and lows; three years into sharing Tsunaki's flat, she is confronted by his ex, who wants her gone and keeps telling her to become independent.
Akutagawa 2006 (second half) · Candidate
Kazoku no shōzō
Title translated by AI:“Family Portrait”
Mitsuharu Sagawa · 41 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2006 (second half) · Candidate
Tosho junbishitsu
Title translated by AI:“The Library Storeroom”
Shinya Tanaka · 34 when first published
Novella · 184 pages
AI-generated summary:A man past thirty who has never held a job drinks on his mother's money; asked at his grandfather's memorial why he won't work, he answers at length, by way of a wartime crime an old schoolteacher once admitted to him.
Akutagawa 2006 (second half) · Candidate
Sono machi no ima wa
Title translated by AI:“That Town, Now”
Tomoka Shibasaki · 33 when first published
Novel · 141 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Uta, twenty-eight, lost her office job when the company went under and now works in a café; after a disastrous group date she runs into Ryotaro, a younger man, and the two start meeting to pore over old photographs of Osaka.
Akutagawa 2006 (second half) · Candidate
Shokubutsu shindanshitsu
Title translated by AI:“The Plant Diagnosis Room”
Tomoyuki Hoshino · 41 when first published
Novella · 125 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Hiroki, a solitary bachelor who lives for his walks and attends sessions of a healing practice known as 'plant diagnosis', is asked by a divorced mother to be in her child's life as a grown-up male friend, in no role the family system names.
Akutagawa 2005 (first half) · Winner
土の中の子供 · Tsuchi no naka no kodomo
Fuminori Nakamura · 28 when first published
Novella · 147 pages
AI-generated summary:A taxi driver of twenty-seven cannot escape memories of a childhood spent as an orphan, left by his parents and beaten daily, and as violence keeps pulling at him he looks inside himself for something to live for.
Akutagawa 2005 (second half) · Winner
Oki de matsu
Title translated by AI:“Waiting Offshore”
Akiko Itoyama · 39 when first published
Novella · 108 pages
AI-generated summary:When Futchan, her fellow recruit from the same year's intake, is killed without warning, a woman slips into his flat to honour their pact, in a story of trust and comradeship between colleagues who were never lovers.
Akutagawa 2005 (first half) · Candidate
Sayonara Amerika
Title translated by AI:“Goodbye, America”
Naoya Higuchi · 24 when first published
Novel
Akutagawa 2005 (first half) · Candidate
Kono hito to kekkon suru kamo
Title translated by AI:“I Might Marry This One”
Taiko Nakajima · 36 when first published
Novella · 168 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Whenever a man catches her eye, a single woman is certain she may marry him, and she is always mistaken; she swears off her hunches, only to find herself drawn at once to Ken from her English class.
Akutagawa 2005 (first half) · Candidate
Ichijiku karēraisu
Title translated by AI:“Fig Curry Rice”
Takami Ito · 34 when first published
Novella · 186 pages
Akutagawa 2005 (first half) · Candidate
Kotori no haha
Title translated by AI:“The Little Bird's Mother”
Tomohiko Kusumi · 33 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2005 (first half) · Candidate
Maruko no yume
Title translated by AI:“Marco's Dream”
Yuki Kurita · 33 when first published
Novel · 132 pages
AI-generated summary:Kazuma, a jobless graduate, joins his sister in Paris, is put in charge of mushrooms at a celebrated restaurant with three stars, and is sent back to Japan to buy marco, a rare native fungus used in its signature dish.
Akutagawa 2005 (first half) · Candidate
Koigumo
Title translated by AI:“Love Spider”
Yukiko Matsui · 38 when first published
Novella · 169 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Chieko, who sews at a factory that makes mascot costumes, falls for 'Machine-Gun Koji', a young embroidery virtuoso, and throws herself into a love in which she means to snare him and gets snared herself.
Akutagawa 2005 (second half) · Candidate
Hiroko Shimizu · 37 when first published
Novel · 142 pages
AI-generated summary:After a fire takes her flat, a young office worker lodges with her boyfriend's mother in a Kobe mansion, and the two women wage a refined, ruthless war.
Akutagawa 2005 (second half) · Candidate
Dōde shinu mi no hitoodori
Title translated by AI:“One Dance for a Body Bound to Die”
Kenta Nishimura · 38 when first published
Novel · 211 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Calling himself the posthumous disciple of Seizo Fujisawa, a destitute Taisho-era writer who died in misery, a man tends his grave and stakes everything on publishing his collected works, while beating his live-in girlfriend.
Akutagawa 2005 (second half) · Candidate
Gin'iro no tsubasa
Title translated by AI:“Silver Wings”
Mitsuharu Sagawa · 40 when first published
Novel · 211 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Felled by a tumour in his brain while studying at Kyoto University, a young man fights his way back to normal life through crushing headaches, weds a nurse from a headache sufferers' circle, and gropes toward love with a spouse who keeps her past hidden.
Akutagawa 2005 (second half) · Candidate
Kuwaietto rūmu ni yōkoso
Title translated by AI:“Welcome to the Quiet Room”
Suzuki Matsuo · 43 when first published
Novel · 138 pages
AI-generated summary:Asuka, a freelance journalist of twenty-eight, comes to in a strange white room, the closed women's ward of a mental hospital, after swallowing too many sleeping pills.
Akutagawa 2005 (second half) · Candidate
Bogī, aishite iru ka
Title translated by AI:“Bogie, Do You Love Me?”
Takami Ito · 34 when first published
Novella · 189 pages
AI-generated summary:Using cash an old friend left behind at his death, a man goes travelling to purchase grief.
Akutagawa 2004 (first half) · Winner
Kaigo nyūmon
Title translated by AI:“An Introduction to Caregiving”
Mobu Norio · 34 when first published
Novella · 106 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A jobless twenty-nine-year-old, steeped in marijuana, spends his days caring at home for his bedridden grandmother, pouring out his fervour and his curses at the world in a torrent of words.
Akutagawa 2004 (second half) · Winner
Gurando fināre
Kazushige Abe · 36 when first published
Novel · 200 pages
AI-generated summary:His family torn apart since Christmas 2001, a man who has lost everything goes back to his hometown of Jinmachi, where one Sunday evening, as the passing buses begin to sound like sleigh bells, he meets two little girls.
Akutagawa 2004 (first half) · Candidate
Kinrō kansha no hi
Title translated by AI:“Labour Thanksgiving Day”
Akiko Itoyama · 38 when first published
Novella · 108 pages
AI-generated summary:Kyoko, jobless, single and in her mid-thirties, lives with her mother; out of duty she agrees to a marriage meeting arranged by Mr Hasegawa, the man who once saved her life, and the suitor proves unbearable.
Akutagawa 2004 (first half) · Candidate
Tomurai no ato
Title translated by AI:“After the Funeral”
Mitsuharu Sagawa · 39 when first published
Novella · 230 pages
Akutagawa 2004 (first half) · Candidate
Suki suki daisuki chō aishiteru
Title translated by AI:“Love You, Love You, Love You So Much”
Otaro Maijo · 31 when first published
Novel · 274 pages · Love, Speculative
AI-generated summary:A novelist writes about his love for Kakio, his girlfriend who has died, in sections that alternate with unrelated, science-fiction love stories, in a novel about love and about writing fiction.
Akutagawa 2004 (first half) · Candidate
Oteru moru
Yuki Kurita · 32 when first published
Novel · 180 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Kiri goes to work at the reception of an underground hotel for members that sells its guests perfect sleep and good dreams, while at home she lives with her twin sister's little girl and the girl's father, a man Kiri once loved.
Akutagawa 2004 (first half) · Candidate
Nichiyō nōen
Title translated by AI:“Sunday Farm”
Yukiko Matsui · 37 when first published
Novella · 123 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:When her father vanishes, leaving behind only a vegetable plot and a website, Moe goes to stand in his garden to search for him.
Akutagawa 2004 (second half) · Candidate
Nobuta o purodyūsu
Title translated by AI:“Producing Nobuta”
Gen Shiraiwa · 21 when first published
Novel · 186 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Shuji Kiritani, the effortlessly popular boy of his class who privately treats life as a game, takes on Nobuta, a bullied new transfer student, as his project and sets out to turn him into a star.
Akutagawa 2004 (second half) · Candidate
Merō 1983
Kenji Taguchi · 43 when first published
Novel
Akutagawa 2004 (second half) · Candidate
Fuzai no ane
Title translated by AI:“The Absent Sister”
Kyoichi Imura · 37 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2004 (second half) · Candidate
人のセックスを笑うな · Hito no sekkusu o warau na
Nao-Cola Yamazaki · 26 when first published
Novella · 80 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A nineteen-year-old art-school student is drawn into an affair with Yuri, his thirty-nine-year-old teacher, driven by a tenderness he cannot quite call love.
Akutagawa 2004 (second half) · Candidate
Kanpō shōsetsu
Title translated by AI:“A Herbal Medicine Story”
Taiko Nakajima · 35 when first published
Novel · 138 pages
AI-generated summary:Minori, a thirty-one-year-old single screenwriter, is gripped by an unexplained trembling on the day she hears her ex-boyfriend is getting married, and when hospitals find nothing wrong she ends up at a clinic of traditional Chinese medicine.
Akutagawa 2004 (second half) · Candidate
Me o tojiru made no mijikai aida
Title translated by AI:“The Short While Before I Close My Eyes”
Tatsuaki Ishiguro · 43 when first published
Novella · 305 pages
Akutagawa 2003 (first half) · Winner
Hariganemushi
Title translated by AI:“Horsehair Worm”
Man'ichi Yoshimura · 42 when first published
Novella · 137 pages
AI-generated summary:A high-school teacher becomes involved with Sachiko, a small, thin woman scraping by at the bottom of society with countless scars on her wrists, and the parasite-like urge to do something cruel begins to stir inside him.
Akutagawa 2003 (second half) · Winner
蛇にピアス · Hebi ni piasu
Hitomi Kanehara · 20 when first published
Novella · 120 pages · Love, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Nineteen-year-old Lui moves in with Ama, whose tongue is forked like a snake's, starts sleeping with Shiba, a sadistic tattoo artist, and throws herself into body modification, from a tongue piercing to a tattoo.
Akutagawa 2003 (second half) · Winner
蹴りたい背中 · Keritai senaka
Risa Wataya · 19 when first published
Novel · 199 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Hatsu, a girl on the athletics team who has just started high school, and Ninagawa, a classmate obsessed with a fashion model, are both outsiders in their class, and a strange, prickly closeness grows between them.
Akutagawa 2003 (first half) · Candidate
Ittsu onrī tōku
Akiko Itoyama · 37 when first published
Novella · 181 pages
AI-generated summary:Dumped on the morning of her move, a woman settles in Kamata, Tokyo, where her suicidal cousin moves in and her companions include a depressed yakuza, a groper she met online and an old classmate standing for election.
Akutagawa 2003 (first half) · Candidate
Shakō
Title translated by AI:“Shutting Out the Light”
Fuminori Nakamura · 26 when first published
Novel · 157 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young man conceals from everyone that his girlfriend Miki was killed in an accident, goes on describing how happy she is, and keeps by him a strange jar sealed in black plastic.
Akutagawa 2003 (first half) · Candidate
Natsuyasumi
Title translated by AI:“Summer Vacation”
Ko Nakamura · 34 when first published
Novel · 203 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:When his friend Yoshida runs away from home for a few days, two married couples face a crisis, and guided by letters and telegrams from their wives, the narrator and Yoshida set out together on a strange summer journey.
Akutagawa 2003 (first half) · Candidate
Onuiko Terumī
Title translated by AI:“Terumi the Seamstress”
Yuki Kurita · 31 when first published
Novella · 179 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Terumi quit her home island at fifteen for Tokyo's Kabukicho and now makes her living as a roving seamstress, moving into clients' homes to sew their clothes, when she falls for Shinai, a singer who performs in women's dress.
Akutagawa 2003 (second half) · Candidate
Umi no sennin
Title translated by AI:“The Hermit of the Sea”
Akiko Itoyama · 37 when first published
Novel · 154 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:After a lottery win, Kono quits his job and lives quietly by the blue sea at Tsuruga, until a useless god calling himself Fantasy turns up and asks to lodge with him.
Akutagawa 2003 (second half) · Candidate
Guruguru mawaru suberidai
Title translated by AI:“The Spiral Slide”
Ko Nakamura · 34 when first published
Novella · 185 pages
AI-generated summary:Having dropped out of university, a young man who teaches at a cram school advertises for band members under the name of one of his pupils, and in Nakahama, the would-be singer, he recognises a double of himself.
Akutagawa 2003 (second half) · Candidate
Umareru mori
Title translated by AI:“The Forest Being Born”
Rio Shimamoto · 20 when first published
Novel · 165 pages · Love, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Badly hurt by a love affair, a young woman borrows a university friend's flat for the summer holidays, and a reunion with her high-school friend Kiku-chan, and with Kiku's father and brothers, slowly begins to heal her.
Akutagawa 2002 (first half) · Winner
Pāku raifu
Shuichi Yoshida · 34 when first published
Novella · 176 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young man who spends his breaks in Tokyo's Hibiya Park runs into the woman he once spoke to by mistake on the subway, and their chance meetings there, kept at a careful distance, make the familiar scenery come painfully alive.
Akutagawa 2002 (second half) · Winner
Shoppai doraibu
Title translated by AI:“Salty Drive”
Tamaki Daido · 36 when first published
Novella · 193 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Miho, thirty-four and single in a harbour town, drifts toward living with Mr Tsukumo, a feeble, slope-shouldered man in his sixties with a wife and children, in a love story that is sad and comic at once.
Akutagawa 2002 (first half) · Candidate
Nishibi no machi
Title translated by AI:“Town of the Setting Sun”
Kazumi Yumoto · 43 when first published
Novella · 133 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In a Kitakyushu town in the mid-1960s, ten-year-old Kazushi and his young mother are joined by Tekojii, his grandfather, a man who has lived without rules and who now crouches silently in a corner of their room, full of secrets.
Akutagawa 2002 (first half) · Candidate
Chijinda ai
Title translated by AI:“Shrunken Love”
Mitsuharu Sagawa · 37 when first published
Novel · 180 pages
AI-generated summary:Okada, long-serving teacher of a special-needs class, is pursued by Makino, an ex-pupil of the school who once hit an autistic boy Okada taught, and finds himself sharing drinks with him every week.
Akutagawa 2002 (first half) · Candidate
Ikarosu no mori
Title translated by AI:“The Forest of Icarus”
So Kurokawa · 41 when first published
Novel · 189 pages
AI-generated summary:A man looks back on a journey of his teens and on the people he briefly met and lost in a remote town of northern Sakhalin, a place of harsh nature where memory seems to have been left behind.
Akutagawa 2002 (first half) · Candidate
Suna no wakusei
Title translated by AI:“Planet of Sand”
Tomoyuki Hoshino · 37 when first published
Novella · 228 pages
Akutagawa 2002 (first half) · Candidate
Kanojo no pikunikku sengen
Title translated by AI:“Her Picnic Declaration”
Yuri Norizuki · 39 when first published
Novella · 211 pages
Akutagawa 2002 (second half) · Candidate
銃 · Jū
Fuminori Nakamura · 25 when first published
Novel · 198 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:On a rain-soaked riverbank, university student Nishikawa comes upon a dead man with a pistol lying beside him, and as he grows fascinated by the gun's beauty he becomes convinced that he will one day fire it.
Akutagawa 2002 (second half) · Candidate
Suishinin no kikan
Title translated by AI:“The Return of the Drowned”
Masatsugu Ono · 32 when first published
Novel · 285 pages
Akutagawa 2002 (second half) · Candidate
Ritoru bai ritoru
Rio Shimamoto · 19 when first published
Novel · 155 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Out of high school and working part-time, Fumi lives quietly with two others, her mother and a much younger sister by another father, in a household where a tangled family history now and then casts a shadow.
Akutagawa 2002 (second half) · Candidate
Ierō
Yukiko Matsui · 35 when first published
Novella · 166 pages
AI-generated summary:Yukie sells cosmetics at a counter in a station mall, where a run of strange customers come to see her.
Akutagawa 2002 (second half) · Candidate
Kagami no mori
Title translated by AI:“The Forest of Mirrors”
Yurie Wada · 44 when first published
Novella · 246 pages
Akutagawa 2001 (first half) · Winner
Chūin no hana
Title translated by AI:“Flower of the In-Between”
Sokyu Genyu · 45 when first published
Novella · 173 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:When Ume, a local medium, dies on the very day she predicted, a Zen priest conducting her rites finds his wife sensing the dead woman's presence and asking him what really becomes of people after death.
Akutagawa 2001 (second half) · Winner
Mōsupīdo de haha wa
Title translated by AI:“Mother at Full Speed”
Yu Nagashima · 29 when first published
Novella · 160 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a northern town under low clouds, Shin, a sixth-grader, looks on unfazed as his mother, a woman who hurls things and holds jobs she is ill-suited to, floors the accelerator and announces she may marry.
Akutagawa 2001 (first half) · Candidate
Shohōsen
Title translated by AI:“Prescription”
Hiroko Shimizu · 33 when first published
Novel · 130 pages
Akutagawa 2001 (first half) · Candidate
ニッポニアニッポン · Nipponia nippon
Kazushige Abe · 33 when first published
Novel · 160 pages
AI-generated summary:A seventeen-year-old shut-in, who feels a kinship with the endangered crested ibis because its character appears in his surname, arms himself with the internet and leaves his room with a plan of revolt centred on the bird.
Akutagawa 2001 (first half) · Candidate
Jamu no akibin
Title translated by AI:“The Empty Jam Jar”
Mitsuharu Sagawa · 36 when first published
Novel · 158 pages
Akutagawa 2001 (first half) · Candidate
Saidokā ni inu
Title translated by AI:“A Dog in the Sidecar”
Yu Nagashima · 29 when first published
Novella · 160 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:After her mother walks out, ten-year-old Kaoru suddenly finds Yoko, her father's bold and stylish girlfriend, moving into the house, and the two of them build a quiet, unexpected friendship.
Akutagawa 2001 (first half) · Candidate
Hikari e no kumotsu
Title translated by AI:“An Offering to the Light”
Yurie Wada · 43 when first published
Novella · 246 pages
Akutagawa 2001 (second half) · Candidate
Yūutsu na ichigo
Title translated by AI:“Melancholy Strawberry”
Tamaki Daido · 35 when first published
Novella · 190 pages
Akutagawa 2001 (second half) · Candidate
Mayonaka no hō e
Title translated by AI:“Toward Midnight”
Tatsuaki Ishiguro · 40 when first published
Novella
Akutagawa 2001 (second half) · Candidate
Minami e kudaru michi
Title translated by AI:“The Road Down South”
Yoshihisa Okazaki · 33 when first published
Novel · 245 pages
Akutagawa 2001 (second half) · Candidate
Roku fīto shita kara
Title translated by AI:“From Six Feet Under”
Yuri Norizuki · 38 when first published
Novella · 211 pages
Akutagawa 2000 (first half) · Winner
Hanakutashi
Title translated by AI:“Flower-Rotting Rain”
Hisaki Matsuura · 46 when first published
Novella · 150 pages
AI-generated summary:Betrayed by a business partner and left with his studio's debts, a middle-aged designer agrees to evict a stubborn tenant from a decrepit Tokyo apartment, and in the endless rain his mind drifts back to a lover who has died.
Akutagawa 2000 (first half) · Winner
きれぎれ · Kiregire
Kou Machida · 38 when first published
Novella · 188 pages
AI-generated summary:A spendthrift painter who drinks hard and shuns all work becomes infatuated with the wife of a more successful schoolmate, a woman once proposed to him as a bride, and begins plotting as fantasy and reality blur.
Akutagawa 2000 (second half) · Winner
熊の敷石 · Kuma no shikiishi
Toshiyuki Horie · 36 when first published
Novella · 123 pages
AI-generated summary:On a stay in France, a Japanese man goes to see Yan, a friend from years ago, in a rural town, and encounters the Jewish past bound up with Yan's family, along with Yan's landlady and her small son, who is blind.
Akutagawa 2000 (second half) · Winner
Seisui
Title translated by AI:“Holy Water”
Yuichi Seirai · 42 when first published
Novel · 315 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A dying father puts his faith in a 'holy water' sold by a childhood friend whom others call a swindler, while his son resents the scheme and a struggle for control of the family supermarket unfolds around them.
Akutagawa 2000 (first half) · Candidate
Hadaka
Title translated by AI:“Naked”
Tamaki Daido · 34 when first published
Novella · 190 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A nineteen-year-old works as a hostess in a Hakata bar alongside her gaunt cousin and her aunt, the woman who took her father from her mother, in a family of three generations of women propping one another up by the Naka River.
Akutagawa 2000 (first half) · Candidate
Maruko Pōro to watakushi
Title translated by AI:“Marco Polo and I”
Tomohiko Kusumi · 28 when first published
Novel · 174 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In a Genoa prison in 1298, a cellmate records Marco Polo's tales of the East, which slowly turn into a different story under his pen.
Akutagawa 2000 (first half) · Candidate
Neko no mochū
Title translated by AI:“Mourning the Cat”
Yojiro Sato · 51 when first published
Novella · 194 pages
AI-generated summary:A man buries the cat he kept for fifteen years with full honours, though he never adored it, and is left facing his own age and an indifferent world.
Akutagawa 2000 (first half) · Candidate
Rakuten'ya
Title translated by AI:“The Optimist”
Yoshihisa Okazaki · 32 when first published
Novel · 265 pages
AI-generated summary:A man past thirty who has never cut the cord drifts through life without working, wandering in the company of the unpredictable women he takes up with and longing to be anywhere but here.
Akutagawa 2000 (second half) · Candidate
Nettaigyo
Title translated by AI:“Tropical Fish”
Shuichi Yoshida · 32 when first published
Novel · 221 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Daisuke, a carpenter, moves in with a beautiful single mother and hopes to marry her, but his withdrawn stepbrother, who spends his days watching tropical fish, joins the household, and a gap starts to open between the couple.
Akutagawa 2000 (second half) · Candidate
Modoroki
So Kurokawa · 39 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Years after his father's suicide outside the family rice shop in Kyoto, a man follows the memories of three generations, his grandfather's, his father's and his own, around a shrine called Modoroki near the Shiga border.
Akutagawa 2000 (second half) · Candidate
Mizu no hesaki
Title translated by AI:“The Prow of the Water”
Sokyu Genyu · 44 when first published
Novel · 144 pages
AI-generated summary:At a hot-spring retreat where the gravely ill gather for its healing spring, a Zen monk teaches calligraphy and counsels the guests, among them a cheerful but lonely Christian woman with terminal cancer.
Akutagawa 2000 (second half) · Candidate
Suppon
Title translated by AI:“Snapping Turtle”
Tamaki Daido · 34 when first published
Novella · 190 pages