Word: akutagawa
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...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...
JAPANESE SHORT STORIES, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (224 pp.; Liveright; $4.95). Akutagawa, who committed suicide in 1927, is still considered the most Occidental, as well as one of the most influential, Japanese writers. His famed Rashomon was made into an unforgettable movie and later a Broadway play. In this new collection of ten stories, he is badly served by Translator Takashi Kojima, who has used almost every cliché in the English language. But even so, Akutagawa's combination of savagery and detachment can raise Western hackles and dampen Western brows...
...moment of truth for these characters sadly shatters the mythic mood of the play. When the bandit is revealed as a braggart, the samurai as a snuffling coward and his wife as a trollop, the Kanins' script, unlike the film, fumbles away the Swiftian savagery of Akutagawa for something close to farce. What Akutagawa intended as the subtle shadow play of appearance and reality becomes, in the wigmaker's summing up, little more than an optical illusion: "Truth is a firefly...