Natsuko Kuroda, 75 year old woman, won the 148th
Akutagawa prize on 16th of January.
I was surprised to hear the
news because the Akutagawa prize is for promising newcomer writers in
literature. Seventy five year old is the
oldest in the 80-year-history of the award.
Kuroda is more than just an old lady. She seems to be beyond her age. To be exact, she is beyond our common notion
of what old women should be. She is
still youthful. Besides, there
is something very different about her.
She
started creating stories at the tender age of 5. Since then she has been writing novels just because she
likes doing it. It didn’t matter to
her at all whether her novels won a prize of not. She was just in pursuit of whatever she wanted to express
and she wasn’t even interested in the awards wining games.
She
answered some questions after wining the prize.
“When
I turned 70s, I started thinking that it would be very nice if I had readers
who enjoy my novels. That’s why I decided
to apply for the prize again for the first time in 40 years.” She added. ”Thank you for finding my
work while I’m alive.”
Her
prize-wining novel, “Ab Sango” is very unique and challenging in its writing style.
It depicts
without using individual names or pronouns the
memories of a child. And it adapts
horizontal writing instead of vertical as Japanese is usually written.
However,
it’s not just play on words, rather she is a true professional in the Japanese language. She used to be a proofreader for a
magazine, Mari Clare Japon, which I sometimes wrote fashion articles as a
freelance writer. It’s so fun to
imagine her checking and correcting what I wrote.
In
Japan, we are heading toward the aging society and now companies and marketers are
starting to focus on so-called “senior” people, who are forming a big promising
market. But we should know that
they are not stereotyped senior people, but rather, they might be a new type of
old people like Kuroda. Old people
are changing here.
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