Annal:1996 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction or Nonfiction

Audrey Hepburns Neck: A Novel

Alan Brown

• 1996 Kiriyama winner
• Score: 10.46

Offering a unique perspective and unusual insight into modern Japan and its wartime past, Audrey Hepburn’s Neck is also a shrewd study of cross-cultural obsessions, and of erotic, romantic and familial love.

The American author Alan Brown crosses both racial and cultural lines to tell his story through the eyes of a young, handsome Japanese cartoonist, Toshiyuki (“Toshi”) Okamoto, who traces his strong attraction to Western women bock to his ninth birthday, when his mother took him to see Audrey Hepburn in the movie “Roman Holiday.”

Leaving behind a sad, silent childhood—which was spent living in two rooms above the family noodle shop on an isolated peninsula in the far north of Japan—Toshi moves to Tokyo to pursue his career. There he falls under the spell of three Americans: his best friend and confidante, the generous and extroverted Paul, a gay advertising copywriter who has plenty of his romantic mishaps with Japanese men; Jane, his glamorous but emotionally unstable teacher at the Very Romantic English Academy, with whom Toshi has a hazardous sexual affair; and,…

East to America: Korean American Life Stories

Elaine H. Kim, Eui-Young Yu

• 1996 Kiriyama finalist
• Score: 6.46

As Los Angeles burned in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, the only images of the Korean American community broadcast to the general public were of hysterical shopkeepers and gun toting merchants. East to America contrasts these images with the true complexity and diversity of the Korean community through over thirty powerful, candid interviews. Men and women from New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles render a portrait of a community grappling with racial tensions, class and gender differences, and differing notions of family and home. Also included are a concise overview of Korean history that contextualizes these stories and a forward by Obie Award winner Anna Deaver Smith, whose work “Twilight” focused on the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Hiroshima Forever: The Ecology of Mourning

Michael Perlman

• 1996 Kiriyama finalist
• Score: 6.46

John Hersey’s Hiroshima moved us almost unbearably. But where do we go from there? Fifty years after the tragic events, Hiroshima Forever shows us that what we want most—the endurance of a habitable, humane world—is born of our willingness to open our hearts to the sorrows of others—other races, nationalities, and individuals, but also other forms of being: animals, mountains, land and trees. To share in the mourning and misfortune of these “others,” including past and present enemies, leads us to the truth of our ecological devastation and the possibility of going beyond. Hiroshima Forever insists that our capacity to open to the sorrows of others is paradoxically the only way to heal and protect ourselves. It consists of twelve profoundly thought-provoking essays in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science

David Williams

• 1996 Kiriyama finalist
• Score: 6.46

Davis Williams explores the historical experience of Japan in the period since it embarked on”modernization” which illuminates the limitations of Western social theory. He criticizes Western social science, and explains why mainstream economists, and historians of political thought have ignored Japan’s modern achievements.

Virgin Widows: Fiction from Modern China

Gu Hua, Howard Goldblatt

• 1996 Kiriyama finalist
• Score: 6.46

Things just keep getting better and better.…Well, don’t they? If you are a woman and you live in China, to answer this question you will need not only to look around you but to look back, to see not just how things are now but how they once were. China has traveled a long and torturous road since the collapse of the final imperial dynasty and the establishment of a modern republic early in this century; but have the nature of women’s lives and their opportunities for just and equal treatment improved?

Renowned writer Gu Hua confronts this issue in Virgin Widows, a poignant and disquieting novel that unfolds in alternating chapters the stories of two women whose lives, despite being separated by nearly a century, reveal a disturbing similarity. First published in China in 1985, it appears now in English for the first time.

The Weight of the Yen: How Denial Imperils America's Future and Ruins an Alliance

R. Taggart Murphy

• 1996 Kiriyama finalist
• Score: 6.46

In the eight years from 1980 to 1988, America fell from financial grace, becoming the world’s largest debtor. This happened because the United States spent and Japan saved. In the early 1980s, Reagan’s Washington discovered that Japan would cheerfully lend their vast savings to the United States by buying U.S. government bonds. How the Japanese money accumulated, the system that created it, and American fumbling that led to crippling debt service, a loss of much of our manufacturing base, and our economy’s diminishing good jobs. The Weight of the Yen explains it all, in an intriguing, jargon-free analysis of the past fifteen years and the problems between America and Japan that are yet to come.