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The Kiriyama Prize

By Bobby /Mar 31, 2007
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SAN FRANCISCO (March 27, 2007) - Pacific Rim Voices announces today the honorees for the 11th annual Kiriyama Prize. Haruki Murakami’s book of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is this year’s fiction winner. The Prize is presented by Pacific Rim Voices, an independent non-profit organization dedicated to celebrating literature that contributes to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia.

Author Haruki Murakami is the first Japanese national to win the Kiriyama Prize. The world-renowned author’s work has received numerous literary awards in Japan and has been translated into 38 languages. He has written 11 novels, but in the preface to Blind Willow Murakami states clearly his preference for writing short stories, saying “I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy.” In a moment highly befitting the author of surrealistic stories, Murakami realized he could write a novel in the instant he witnessed American baseball player Dave Hilton hit a double in a Yakult Swallows game at Tokyo’s Jingu Stadium in 1978. Murakami reportedly went home after the game and began his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, that night. The book was published in 1979.

Writing about Murakami in the Chicago Tribune, NPR’s Alan Cheuse, who served as fiction judge for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize, said: “He has mastered the techniques and perspectives of major 20th century Western fiction, turned all of it toward the elucidation of the life of his own culture, and produced stories that have the attractive quality of seeming delightfully familiar and yet pleasingly strange at the same time.”

Recognition must also be given to Murakami’s translators, Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin, whose fine work allows English-language readers full access to “Planet Murakami"—the name David Jays of The Observer gives to the author’s fictional world. Rubin has authored a book about Murakami’s work called Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.

LINK: The Kiriyama Prize

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