Word: akutagawa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...discovers new artists. He has turned the staid Japanese publishing business on its head by selling to the demographic previously written off by traditional publishers as the manga market. He published the poetry book Ejiki by singer-actor-writer Kou Machida seven years before the writer received the Akutagawa Award, one of Japan's highest literary honors, in 2000. In 1998 Takei released the art book Slash With a Knife by Yoshitomo Nara, long before Nara became one of Japan's top painters. The film Hush!, which Takei helped market, has received numerous awards, including the Yokohama Film Festival...
...writers, like prophets, are sometimes dishonored in their own countries. So it is with Murakami. He is commercially successful. That can be a curse in Japan, where the literati distinguish condescendingly between "pure" literature and fiction for the masses. Highbrow novelists compete for the tony Akutagawa Prize. Their down-market brethren wrestle over the Naoki Prize. Murakami, 53, has won neither (he has garnered lesser awards, including the Gunzo for debut novels.) "Murakami's work is in-between," explains Mitsuyoshi Numano, a literature professor at the University of Tokyo. "If a writer pursues high-quality literature, the book doesn...
...gritty Gold Rush, Akutagawa prizewinner Miri Yu uncovers the psychic machinery linking wealth and violence, ennui and petty crime, boredom and murder in a tale of a teen who commits patricide, hiding the corpse in a basement vault filled with gold. In Yu's Japan, the kids are definitely not all right?but society is far too screwed up to notice...