Chapter 313: The Fin de Siècle Tenka Ippin! (Patreon)

October 12, 2000, 1:00 p.m. Swedish time.

A thin layer of autumn sunlight lay over the streets of Stockholm's Old Town, and the air carried a chill blown in from the Baltic.

In front of the Swedish Academy, a gray-yellow building more than two centuries old, reporters from around the world had already gathered.

Cameras bristled like artillery behind the cordon, and photographers kept fiddling with their equipment. The print reporters stood in twos and threes, talking in low voices, their white breath condensing into small puffs of mist in the cold air.

The same scene played out here every year at this time. The Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the most widely watched prizes of all, was always a centerpiece of the culture news.

Every reporter had a prediction list of their own. Some bet on a certain American postmodern master, some favored an Irish poet, and others thought it might finally be some African writer's turn.

After all, the Academy's tastes in recent years had grown more… diverse?

When the clock struck one, the heavy oak doors of the Academy swung open, and Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl stepped out. He wore a dark gray suit with the Academy's emblem pinned to his chest, and in his hand he held the document that was about to shake the world.

Flashes began to fire in dense bursts, the shutters merging into one continuous clatter. Every reporter's gaze locked onto him.

Engdahl stopped before the microphone and read out a name in Swedish.

For a second or two, the silence was total.

It wasn't an English name, or a French one, and certainly not a German one. It didn't belong to any European or American language family at all.

The syllables sounded strange and tongue-twisting. Many of the reporters couldn't even place its nationality at first. Only when they saw the romanized letters appear on the big screen — Tsushima Kagami — with the nationality "Japan" printed beneath, did their confusion slowly turn into shock.

"Japanese?"

Someone in the crowd blurted it out.

The foreign correspondents traded blank looks. Some instinctively flipped through the background files they had prepared, hoping to find even a scrap of information on this name, but the vast majority came up empty.

In the full hundred years since the Nobel Prize began, every laureate in literature had come from the West without exception. The farthest the boundary had ever stretched was to a few literary giants of Russia.

And today, that unwritten rule, a century old, had been broken by a name from the distant East.

Then it was as if someone had dropped a lump of sodium into water, and the whole venue erupted.

Reporters speaking a dozen different languages pulled out their phones at once. Some dialed, some thumbed out text messages, and some filmed the screen while rattling off something into their recorders.

The orderly press conference turned into chaos and clamor in an instant, like a volcanic eruption of collective emotion.

Engdahl ignored the commotion and went on to read the citation. His voice was steady and solemn, carrying across the whole square through the microphone.

"Tsushima Kagami's works, with their acute sensibility and superb narrative skill, express the essence of the Japanese soul…"

Each word was like a nail, pinning everyone present into an entirely new picture of the world.

"…He has made an outstanding contribution to building a spiritual bridge between East and West."

The citation was short, but the weight of it was enough to leave everyone present breathless.

When Engdahl closed the document and turned back toward the Academy doors, time seemed to start flowing again. The reporters reached for their phones and communication gear almost in unison, and a babel of languages boiled over across the square.

"File the bulletin! File it now!"

CNN's correspondent growled into his microphone.

"Japanese author Tsushima Kagami wins! The first Asian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature!"

The BBC reporter had already begun an emergency live link in front of the camera, speaking nearly twice as fast as usual.

"This is a historic moment! With this decision, the Swedish Academy has completely shattered the West's hundred-year monopoly on the Nobel Prize in Literature!"

AFP, Reuters and AP reporters were all racing to send their copy back, fingers flying over keyboards, laptop screens flickering in the autumn sunlight.

Amid all this frenzy, an even more astonishing piece of information was being verified and passed along.

"Wait!"

The first to dig up the data was a young reporter from The New York Times. He stared at the information on his screen, his voice trembling slightly.

"This guy's date of birth… 1981?"

The people next to him leaned in to look, and then froze as well.

"He's nineteen this year?"

"He might even be only eighteen!"

"He still has two and a half months to go, after all."

Another colleague added the detail.

The news spread through the press corps like wildfire. Everyone's first reaction was disbelief, and some even suspected the records were wrong.

Nobel laureates in literature averaged sixty-five years old, and even the youngest had been past forty. A university student not yet twenty?

Winning the highest honor in world literature?

If that wasn't a fairy tale, what was?

"Good Lord! Either the Swedish Academy has gone mad or I have."

An old reporter from the French newspaper Le Monde took off his glasses and wiped them, then put them back on and looked at the screen again, making sure he hadn't misread the numbers.

"Nineteen… I've been in this business thirty years and never seen anything like it."

But fact was fact.

The news, along with the winner's age, turned into radio waves and network data packets and flew from this ancient Nordic city to every corner of the world.

Every wire service's headline stressed the same two key phrases.

"First Asian. Only nineteen."

Combined, those two labels hit with enough force to make anyone who read the story stop what they were doing and check, again and again, that they hadn't misread it.

And in Japan, the news was about to set off a celebration unlike any before it.

At eight o'clock sharp, Tokyo time, it was prime time for every major TV network.

NHK General was airing its Taiga drama. TV Asahi's drama had just reached tonight's climax, and tens of millions of Japanese families sat around their televisions, enjoying the most relaxed hour of their day.

Then the picture suddenly cut out.

On NHK's screen appeared a news anchor who was visibly agitated. He didn't even have a script in front of him, so he had clearly been pulled onto the live set at the last minute.

"We interrupt this program with breaking news!"

His voice shook with barely suppressed emotion.

"At one p.m. local time in Sweden, just before eight p.m. Tokyo time, the Swedish Academy officially announced the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature…"

Any annoyance at the interrupted drama had no time to take root before the next words crushed it completely.

"…The winner is a Japanese author, Mr. Tsushima Kagami!"

A Japanese author?

The Nobel Prize in Literature?

When those two phrases appeared together, most Japanese brains needed a moment to digest what they meant.

Since the Nobel Prizes were established, Japanese had won in physics, chemistry, medicine, and even peace. But the literature prize, the most dazzling crown of all, had never landed on an Asian head.

It was like a spiritual fortress the West had built for itself, impregnable and impassable.

And now that fortress had been breached by a Japanese named Tsushima Kagami.

The news burst out like cold water thrown into hot oil.

The five major commercial networks — Fuji TV, TBS, Nippon TV, TV Asahi and TV Tokyo — reacted almost simultaneously.

Fuji TV cut straight into the Thursday-night drama it was airing and switched to the newsroom.

A TBS anchor even said on air, "History has been rewritten."

Nippon TV and TV Asahi also flashed bold "BREAKING NEWS" captions.

The most surprising of all was TV Tokyo.

A near-legendary presence in Japanese television, TV Tokyo was famous nationwide for its broadcasting policy of staying unfazed even if Mount Tai collapsed before it. Whether it was an earthquake, a tsunami or a seismic shift in politics, it kept airing its anime and food shows, unmoved.

Japanese netizens even circulated a joke: if the day ever came that TV Tokyo interrupted its anime for a news bulletin, it would probably be the end of the world.

In truth, that was mostly down to budget and staffing limits. In a major natural disaster or emergency, it still ran crawl-text bulletins.

But tonight, TV Tokyo suddenly cut its anime, and the screen switched to an emergency news special!

On screen was an unfamiliar, beautiful presenter holding a sheet of paper that looked like a script. She wore a look of total bewilderment and delivered the breaking news with obvious inexperience.

She had probably been dragged in from somewhere, some non-presenter staff member thrown straight onto the air.

"[Breaking News] Japanese author Tsushima Kagami wins the Nobel Prize in Literature!"

Countless otaku watching anime froze for a moment, then shot up off their sofas.

More than the fact that Tsushima Kagami had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, they were stunned that Tsushima Kagami had actually defeated the near-urban-legend that was TV Tokyo!

Online forums blew up instantly.

On 2ch, the anonymous board that had only recently been founded, threads about Tsushima Kagami refreshed several times a second. Some were shocked, some ecstatic, some doubted the news was real, but far more had already fallen into a state of near-frenzied celebration.

"Japanese literature has finally been recognized by the world!"

"Only nineteen? You've got to be kidding me. If that's not a genius, what is?"

"I always said our darling Kagami would go far!"

"From today on, he's our national author!"

Behind the revelry of that night, deeper feelings ran like an undercurrent.

In October Tokyo, the ginkgo trees along the streets were just starting to turn yellow, and the night wind already carried a trace of cold.

But tonight, the chatter in izakayas was louder than usual, passersby kept stopping in front of convenience store TVs to look up, and every taxi radio was tuned to the news channel.

Tomorrow's morning papers would settle everything.

October 13, 5:30 a.m.

Newsstands and convenience stores all over Tokyo had begun receiving the day's newspapers.

The delivery staff noticed that today's front page of The Asahi Shimbun was strikingly different. To be precise, it seized the reader's attention in a nearly brutish way.

The lead headline ran in a single line, enlarged, bolded and blackened, taking up almost a third of the space at the top of the page.

"Tenka Ippin at Century's End!"

Each of those eight characters carried a crushing weight, as if they might punch through the paper.

"Tenka Ippin" means the best under heaven, peerless in all the world!

This was the autumn before the true new millennium. After the long decade of loss that followed the collapse of the bubble economy, the Japanese media used this nearly brazen headline to proclaim the arrival of a moment of glory for Japan.

The editorial was written with surging passion. The lead writer devoted long passages to the history of modern Japanese literature, running from every great writer and literary master of any influence at all to the young man of nineteen who had now climbed to the summit of world literature.

"This is the dream Japanese literature has failed to realize for a hundred years!"

the editorial declared.

"The name of Tsushima Kagami, along with the Nobel Prize in Literature, will be carved forever on the monument of Japanese culture."

"The glory of the nation!"

That was the four-character phrase nearly every newspaper and TV station repeated that day.

On NHK's morning news program, a guest commentator spoke in a rare, emotional tone.

"This is not just a literary prize. It is the world's highest recognition of Japanese culture!"

"After the lost decade, Tsushima-sensei has given the Japanese people a reason to hold their heads up again."

He wasn't wrong.

Since the bubble economy collapsed in the late eighties, Japan had sunk into a long, endless stagnation. Companies went under, unemployment climbed, and "Japan as Number One," once a proud boast, had turned into a bitter self-mockery.

The whole society lay under a gray, oppressive pressure. People had grown used to cutting expenses, lowering expectations, and picking their way carefully through the mire of deflation.

And Tsushima Kagami's win was like a sudden shaft of light.

Adachi Ward, Tokyo, one of the twenty-three special wards with the lowest average income.

On a morning street, a middle-aged man in worn work clothes stopped at a newsstand. He took out some coins and bought a copy of The Asahi Shimbun, his eyes fell on the thick black headline, and his hands began to tremble slightly.

The man was called Yamada, a worker at a small metal-processing factory.

The factory had shrunk from over a hundred employees in the bubble years to fewer than thirty, and his wages had been cut by nearly half. He hadn't bought a newspaper in a long time, since every yen saved counted.

But today was different. Today he would take this paper home to show his wife and his son, who was already in high school.

"Tsushima Kagami…"

He murmured the name silently, his throat tight.

He didn't know this young man, and had never read a single one of his works. But at this moment, what that name stood for made his back, bent by life, straighten a little without his noticing.

A Japanese had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

A Japanese.

A Japanese of only nineteen.

Yamada didn't know why he wanted to cry, but his eyes did feel warm. Maybe it was because he hadn't heard good news in so long. Maybe it was because the word "Japan" was finally, once again, drawing the world's gaze in a good way.

He folded the paper carefully, tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket, and set off for the factory, his steps steadier than usual.

Scenes like this were playing out all over Japan at once.

An Osaka trading company employee held up his paper on a commuter train, reading the details of the award closely. A housewife in Nagoya stopped in front of a supermarket TV. A university student in Sapporo forwarded the news link to every friend he had.

In different cities and different corners, countless ordinary people like Yamada felt, at this moment, an emotion long absent and nearly forgotten.

It was something called "pride."

In the lost decade, what the Japanese lacked most was pride. The arrogance of having bought Rockefeller Center had turned into the resignation of selling off overseas assets. The confidence that "Japanese-style management is number one in the world" had turned into doubt about their own model.

And at a moment like this, a young Japanese had conquered the West's most central cultural fortress with words, and that soothed people's hearts better than any economic recovery figure.

Things were getting better, things were about to get better!

Everyone felt that all of this meant Japan was finally going to recover!

What lost decade? It had only been a time of biding their strength!

The invincible Japanese people would once again stand at the center of the world stage!

It was as if overnight everyone had drifted back into that dreamlike bubble era, when they boasted of buying up America and spent money like water!

Even the poorest patriot in Adachi Ward, thinking of Japan's future industry and wealth, couldn't help puffing out his chest!

The major media spared no praise for Tsushima Kagami.

The title "national author" was formally established that day. No one raised an objection, as though it had always been a matter of course.

Tsushima Kagami's works sold out in bookstores, publishers' phone lines were jammed, and printing plants worked overtime through the night to run more copies, but still couldn't meet the surging demand.

On the internet, the worshippers' fervor was equally unconcealed.

The message boards on Yahoo! Japan were flooded to the point of near paralysis, every post brimming with almost uncontrolled enthusiasm.

"He's Japan's god!"

"The genius of this age!"

"A literary giant beyond his time!"

These words piled up on the screen at astonishing density, as if trying to carve Tsushima Kagami's name into the nation's collective memory in the most scorching language possible.

From the moment the Swedish Academy announced the winner's name, only a dozen or so hours had passed, and already Tsushima Kagami's standing in the hearts of the Japanese people had been pushed to a suffocating height.

He was the embodiment of glory, the symbol of hope, the light at the end of a dark tunnel, and more than that, the spider's thread the Buddha lowered, the only one everyone wanted to grab to escape hell and be saved!

With that, the national worship of Tsushima Kagami reached its peak!