Author Yang Yi won the Akutagawa Prize on Tuesday to become the first Chinese to receive the prestigious literary award, the prize's organizers said.

The 44-year-old Yang's award-winning work "Tokiga nijimu asa" (literally, "A Morning When Time Blurs"), written in Japanese, is set during and after China's democratization movement centering on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

It follows a Chinese man who lives through those times and later moves to Japan, still holding on to his ideals.