It is often said about the Naoki Prize and the Akutagawa Prize that they were originally devised by Kan Kikuchi in order to boost the sales of magazines in the two slack months February and August. Is it true or false? Where did such rumor come from? Why has it been so widely spread? Here I will examine the background of this rumor about the origin of the literary prizes, whose names are so well-known although little is known about what they actually are.

In the prewar period there were some writers who started their career because they won a prize in the literary competition regularly held by the magazine Kaizō, the prototype of the current literary prizes such as the Naoki Prize and the Akutagawa Prize. But unfortunately most of them soon became obscure or quit writing. This article will focus on Kōjirō Serizawa, one of the few prize winners who succeeded as a professional writer, to show what role those “prize writers” played in the history of modern Japanese literature.

In the early Showa Period there was a fad for true stories. Taking advantage of it, the magazine Bungeishunjū started a “true stories” column and held a prize competition for true stories. Sotoo Tachibana was one of the writers who won the first prize in the competition. But his true story “Sakaba-roulette-trouble-ki” was a very problematic one because there the author dared to challenge the magazine's concept of “true stories” itself. In this sense it is a sort of meta-true story that makes us think anew what is true in literature.

In the late 1970s many prizes for new writers were established for the stimulation of the literary market. Haruki Murakami was one of such young writers as benefited from this policy; he was awarded the Gunzō Prize for New Writers in 1979. This article will first describe the situations where those new writers were placed and then show how Murakami was categorized in the literary circle of the late 1970s. By closely reading his early short stories, we can know his peculiar position as a writer influenced by American novels.

In the literary competition sponsored by the Osaka Asahi Shinbun Nobuko Yoshiya was awarded the first prize for her novel Chi-no-hatemade, which was serialized in the newspaper. It has usually been regarded as a novel which directly reflects the liberal intellectualism of the Taishō Period. Certainly the author seems to believe in the power of cultivated personality which can overcome even complicated problems concerning female sexuality and gender. But her excessively didactic style of storytelling paradoxically reveals the false and questionable nature of liberal intellectualism.

Now Tatsuo Hori is popular again because of the adaptation of his novel Kaze-tachinu for Hayao Miyazaki's animated film. But most literary critics seem to take a negative attitude to his new fans, saying that they don't understand the true meaning of his work. Such academic elitism reminds me of the student soldiers' sense of privilege. It is generally believed that they read Hori's novels as an act of protest against the war, but actually they did so just to show off their intellectual superiority. Moreover, by exclusively emphasizing the aesthetic value of his work, those critics unconsciously yet politically repress the memories of the war which were inscribed even in his romantic stories.