In a dim reflection of Japan’s rootless young people in 2025, the coveted literary awards, Akutagawa and Naoki, awarded … no one.
In July 2025, the news came that the judges of Japan’s two coveted biannual literary awards, the Akutagawa and Naoki prizes, would not announce winners as they customarily do every July, according to a report in The Japan Times. The development comes as a surprise to many, especially given how rare such a joint decision has been over the years. As per the Japan Times, it is only the sixth occasion since the awards began in 1935 that neither award has been bestowed upon anyone.
The decision may seem improbable given the vastness and richness of the realm of Japanese literature. It is not as though the nation has a shortage of novelists, short story writers, poets, or dramatists.
To take one example, Yoko Ogawa, who won the Akutagawa award in 1990 for Pregnancy Diary, has since gone on to write The Memory Police (1994) and Mina’s Matchbox (2024), among other well-received novels. In her fiction, Ogawa has explored what it means to live in modern Japan as an identity rooted in tradition grows ever more muted and distorted amid the winds of globalizing, homogenizing forces.
To suggest that her relevance peaked back in 1990 would be a stretch. Yoko Ogawa’s themes have never been more pertinent. Sadly, she is on the Akutagawa prize’s selection committee and hence an inappropriate choice for that award.
Rare as it may be, not quite everyone disagrees with the decision not to pick winners this year. In fact, Japan’s most famous living author, Haruki Murakami, happens to be a trenchant critic of the practice of conferring such awards at arbitrary junctures. Murakami’s essay “On Literary Prizes”, which appears in his 2022 collection Novelist as a Vocation, questions the idea that selection committees can and should seek out writers from a pool of ever-plentiful talent at randomly fixed points every year.
The author of Kafka on the Shore, Sputnik Sweetheart, Norwegian Wood, 1Q84, After Dark, Men Without Women, and other novels and story collections cannot help but wonder about the assumption that more than enough deserving writers are always out there, waiting for recognition. It is simply a matter of finding them. In Murakami’s view, a protocol that necessitates tracking down recipients at designated junctures twice annually, year after year—regardless of the merits of the as-yet unselected portion of the contemporary canon—will, inevitably, result in a dumbing down of the criteria, and therefore turning the prizes into a ritual devoid of meaning.
In his essay, Murakami also questions the motives for the literary award as a public ceremony. He voices his disapproval of the commercial motive behind a custom that he argues is all but certain to boost the sales of Bungei Shunju, the publisher that organizes the Akutagawa prize, when announcements of the winners go live in the news and on social media.
Haruki Murakami is not alone. “It does feel like we haven’t seen many outstanding writers emerging recently,” says Motonori Makino, a professor at Gakushuin Women’s College in Tokyo who recently helped organize an exhibit about the friendship between author Yukio Mishima and translator Donald Keene, who did much to bring Mishima and other Japanese writers to readers in the West.
“Just as Japan’s population is declining, I believe both the number of readers and writers is also decreasing. That said, the Akutagawa Prize has a very commercial aspect to it, and to be honest, I personally feel that awarding it twice a year is too frequent. Perhaps it’s okay to have no recipient some years,” Makino adds.
Sad to say, the problems that Murakami diagnoses are the domain of these types of awards more broadly, not just in Japan but anywhere you may care to look. It begs belief that the Nobel committee decided to confer the world’s most prestigious literary awards on Bob Dylan in 2016. In the view of some, Dylan is a writer of doggerel, not literature, as becomes all the more evident when you sit down and view his output as words on a page without any musical accompaniment.
Putting aside Murakami’s critique of the suspect nature of the granting of the Akutagawa and Naoki prizes twice every year, it is worth asking whether the purported lack of worthy recipients in Japanese literature points to a larger question about the state of Japanese society and culture in 2025.
Japan’s modern writers grapple with the question of what their society is or should be, what Japanese people should strive for, and what values ought to come to the fore as Imperial Japan fades ever deeper into the past. Yukio Mishima holds a place in the national literature thanks to his concern, not to say obsession, with the question of how to fill the void at the heart of people’s lives as their homeland morphs into a technology-focused member of a global order that enshrines money as the nexus of all interactions and heaps contempt on the ideas of spiritual and national greatness in which Japan’s wartime generation believed.
If you cannot find an answer to that question, you may well end up like the young couple in Mishima’s short story “Three Million Yen” (1960), who lose themselves in a massive shopping center and amusement park that has sprung up in what used to be a place of worship. They are so much a product of a culture bent on instant gratification and sensual pleasures that the concept of a neon pagoda does not strike them as odd or off-putting.
During a ride in the amusement park meant to simulate the experience of traveling in a submarine, they don’t even get bent out of shape at the sight of a drowned corpse in the underwater space on the other side of the window. A cheap thrill is the highest form of gratification.
For rootless young people such as these, the greatness of the Heian period of Japan’s past bears as little relationship to their lives in the present as pictures in a book they might have to read to pass an undergraduate course. If rootlessness and alienation had become daily features of Japan’s social and cultural life at the time that Mishima wrote, then you have to wonder how people in the age of streaming, texting, Zoom, and AI are facing the void that he documented in his novels and stories.
Amid the Mishima revival that has taken place with the publication of his hitherto uncollected stories, Voices of the Fallen Heroes, and the above-mentioned exhibit at Gakushuin Women’s College in Tokyo, some have evidently forgotten that Mishima was an erratic, troubled individual who openly sympathized with Imperial Japan’s war aims, as he hints at in the many depictions in his novels of the aftermath of Allied operations. He blamed the West for the conflict and did not care who started what.
Going back to the ugly and racist politics of national revanche that Mishima implicitly and at times explicitly endorsed is, of course, not an option. The issue is what values young people in Japan today can and should embrace.
The decision not to grant the Akutagawa and Naoki prizes to anyone might be commendable, but it’s also problematic. Japan’s headlong rush into the technocratic and economically obsessed future has left its writers struggling to find their way and to produce works of merit that will warrant serious consideration on the part of the selection committees of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards. In the world of Japanese literature, contemporary writers have a huge void to fill.