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
Showing 35 of 287 books. 252 aren’t in English yet: show all.
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 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 (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
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 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) · 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 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 (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 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 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 (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
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 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 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) · 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 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 (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 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) · 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.