It's been amazing to experience all the excitement surrounding the latest winners of the Akutagawa Prize, a famous literary prize awarded twice a year to promising, new authors. While TV cameras and photographers crammed Tokyo Kaikan, newspapers and magazines wrote breathless descriptions of what the two winners were wearing and asked whether these young women held the key to ending the publishing industry's seven-year slump.
Media interest started to grow when the finalists were announced, as three of the five were women who were either 19 or 20 years old. When Hitomi Kanehara, 20, won for "Hebi ni pierce (Pierced Earrings for a Snake)" and Risa Wataya, 19, for "Keritai Senaka (The Back One Wants to Kick)," the two became the youngest winners in the history of the Akutagawa Prize. They also represented a study in contrasts: Wataya, a sophomore at Waseda University, looked like a demure ojosan, while Kanehara was dressed like a young Shibuya girl (the newspapers played up her tinted contact lenses, dyed hair, pierced ears and flared miniskirt).
As Minako Saito pointed out in the Asahi Shimbun (Jan. 16), there does seem to be an element of sexism in the media frenzy over the two girls: Why is it considered normal, she asks, for three men in their 30s to be finalists but not young women? She sees the recent rise of female prize winners as due not to a sudden increase in outstanding female writers, but to a change in the attitudes of the older men in the literary establishment.