Kanehara, Hitomi, and Wataya, Risa

▪ 2005

      In early 2004 two young female novelists—Risa Wataya and Hitomi Kanehara—shared Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize for promising new authors, and created a media sensation in Japan with works that captured the perspectives of a generation coming of age in Japan's postbubble economy. Both Wataya's Keritai senaka (roughly translated in English as “The Back I Want to Kick”) and Kanehara's Hebi ni piasu (“Snakes and Earrings”) focused on youths in a contemporary Japan undergoing sweeping social change. Both works were “radical depictions of our time,” said Ryu Murakami, a past Akutagawa Prize winner and a member of the 2004 awards committee.

      Wataya, the youngest-ever recipient of the award, was born on Feb. 1, 1984, in Kyoto, Japan. She debuted as an author at age 17 with Install (2001), for which she won the 2001 Bungei literary prize. The novel depicted a troubled high-school girl's experience with the erotic world of adults through Internet chat rooms. A film version was scheduled for release in early 2005. In Keritai senaka Wataya, a junior at Waseda University in Tokyo, vividly portrayed the self-consciousness and alienation that a girl in her first year of high school experiences. The teen struggles to relate to her peers and develops a love-hate relationship with a loner male classmate. The novel sold more than one million copies in March alone, which made it the best-selling Akutagawa Prize-winning novel since Ryu Murakami's Almost Transparent Blue (1977), which dealt with youthful drug addiction.

      Kanehara was born on Aug. 8, 1983, in Tokyo. She temporarily stopped going to elementary school and, as a teenager, attempted suicide by cutting her wrists. She later attended writing seminars taught by her father, a university professor and translator of children's books. Kanehara eventually dropped out of high school but kept writing. She made her literary debut with Hebi ni paisu, which described a 19-year-old girl's obsession with body alteration. The explicit novel painted a bleak picture of the isolated alcoholic teen's underground life as she adds painful tattoos to her back and pierces her tongue. Kanehara incorporated the vocabulary of the Tokyo streets into her prose and used powerful, precise language to describe the heroine's peculiar sex-and-violence-filled behaviour. The novel won the 2003 Subaru literary award in Japan and sold more than a half million copies. Her second novel, Ash Baby, appeared in 2004.

      The March 2004 issue of the quarterly literary magazine Bungei shinju featured both novels and sold more than 1.1 million copies, breaking its previous sales record. Nevertheless, the awarding of the Akutagawa Prize to these two young women was the subject of much debate in Japan. Many critics hailed the depictions of troubled youth in a changing social milieu, but others saw the award as an effort to boost sales by selecting attractive young writers who explored shocking themes at a time when the book industry was struggling.

Kimiyo Naka-Michaeli

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