All prizes Japan
芥川龍之介賞
Japan · Since 1935 · For books in Japanese
Awarded twice a year by the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature to a story or novella in Japanese by a new or emerging writer, usually first published in a literary magazine during that half-year. Sessions are named after the half-year they cover: the prize for the second half of 2016 was announced in January 2017.
Kikuchi Kan, editor of the magazine Bungeishunjū, founded the prize in 1935 in memory of the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, together with the Naoki Prize for popular fiction. Staff of the publisher Bungeishunjū read the eligible works over many rounds and narrow them to five or six candidates, which are announced in advance. A selection committee of writers, nine members in 2026, then meets in mid-January and mid-July at Shinkiraku, a restaurant in Tokyo's Tsukiji district. If it cannot agree, no prize is given; the prize is also often shared between two authors. The winner receives a pocket watch and one million yen. The prize was suspended from 1945 and resumed in 1949. Winners include Kenzaburō Ōe and Ryū Murakami. Risa Wataya, aged 19, and Hitomi Kanehara, aged 20, shared the prize for the second half of 2003 as its youngest winners.
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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 (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) · 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 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 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 (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 (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 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 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 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.