Twice a year, the Japanese book world eagerly awaits the joint announcement of the country’s most prominent literary awards: the Akutagawa Prize and the Naoki Prize. In the days leading up to the high-profile ceremony, speculation abounds, not just about which nominated writers will win but whether any of them will.
The prestige of the two prizes, given out together each January and July, largely comes from the rigorous standards of their respective judging panels, who may opt against conferring the honors if they feel the shortlists aren’t up to snuff. In the awards’ nine-decade history, the Japan Times noted, the Akutagawa has gone unawarded 33 times, and the Naoki 30 times, and judges have declined to confer both prizes six times—including this past summer.
When they are presented, each award honors a distinct corner of Japanese publishing. The Akutagawa recognizes emerging writers of literary fiction, or what in Japan is called “pure literature,” and the Naoki goes to more established authors of genre fiction, or “popular literature.” The awards are sponsored by the Japanese publisher Bungeishunjū, best known for its eponymous literary magazine, through its foundation, the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature. Both prizes were established in 1935 by Bungeishunjū founder Kan Kikuchi and come with a ¥1 million purse (around $6,500), as well as a pocket watch.
Bungeishunjū magazine editors select the nominees, and each nine-author judging panel chooses its winner from those. Akutagawa nominees are typically short or novella-length stories that have appeared in one of Japan’s major literary magazines, which publish monthly and often run more than 300 pages, while Naoki nominees are generally drawn from published books. The two awards get major attention from Japanese media, and bookstores across the country as well as Amazon Japan often highlight the winning titles. All this reliably results in increased sales, though—as is the case for many U.S. literary awards—the prizes’ ability to move units has waned, according to Edward Mack, a professor of Asian languages and literature at University of Washington and author of Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature.
Nevertheless, the two prizes are a “biannual boost” to the Japanese publishing industry, says literary translator and professor emeritus of Japanese literature at University of Arizona Philip Gabriel, with the Akutagawa helping mint new literary stars and the Naoki giving established authors their flowers.
According to Gabriel, U.S. publishers pay attention to the prizes—particularly the Akutagawa—when looking for works to translate into English, though the winners can be tough to market to stateside readers. Because Akutagawa winners are often novella length, they can be harder to publish and sell in the U.S., where full-length novels are the preferred format for fiction. Meanwhile, the fact that many Naoki-winning novels are historical fiction may make it difficult for them to find an audience in the U.S., given that they require some “background on Japanese history to fully appreciate,” he says. “Imagine a Japanese reader reading Hilary Mantel with little to no knowledge of Henry VIII—that could be challenging.”
Even so, several Akutagawa-winning titles have gone on to make a splash in the U.S., including Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (translated by Ginny Tapley Takamori), published by Grove in 2018, and Mieko Kawakami’s Breast and Eggs (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd), published by Europa in 2020. (Mieko Kawakami is now on the Akutakawa judging panel, alongside International Booker nominees Yoko Ogawa and Hiromi Kawakami.) HarperVia, Hogarth, New Directions, and Soho Press have also published Akutagawa winners in recent years, and Pegusus released Gabriel’s translation of Riku Onda’s Naoki-winning Honeybees and Distant Thunder in 2023.
Regardless of whether the prizes translate directly into sales in Japan or abroad, their value goes far beyond that. As Mack sees it, “One of the biggest beneficiaries may be fiction itself, which is celebrated with each giving of the award for its importance and cultural value, no matter who wins.”
