Japan congratulates Haruki Murakami after receiving the Princess of Asturias Award

Japanese fans and media celebrated today that the Japanese Haruki Murakami, one of the best-known firms in global contemporary literature, received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature on Wednesday for the “uniqueness of its literature”, according to the jury.

Most of the Japanese media echoed the news, highlighting that it is one of the “most prestigious literary awards in Europe”, as pointed out by the state channel NHK, which said that this was the first time that it had been awarded to a Japanese person.

Most of the Japanese media also said that it is the most prestigious award in Spain, while the author’s followers on social networks celebrated the victory by recalling some of their favorite novels by him.

“Haruki Murakami is the first Japanese to win the literary category of Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award, said to be Europe’s most prestigious award. I am very happy”, wrote a user on Twitter.

The reaction of the Japanese side comes after the eternal candidate in the pools for the Nobel Prize for Literature, received this recognition on the eve of his entire career and contributions to global literature, an award that Mario Vargas Llosa has won. Leonard Cohen or Paul Auster, among other authors.

Murakami has been translated into fifty languages ​​and has previously received other international literary awards such as the Franz Kafka and the World Fantasy Award (both in 2006) or the Hans Christian Andersen for Literature (2016), as well as awards in Japan such as the Tanizaki and the Yomiuri.

Other Japanese have received the Princess of Asturias -then called the Prince of Asturias-, such as the astronaut Chaiki Mukai, who was awarded the International Cooperation Award in 1999 and in 2008, Professor Shuji Nakamura won the same recognition for Scientific Research. and physicist Sumio Iijim.

In 2011, the Heroes of Fukushima organization, the name given to the workers at the nuclear power plant and the emergency personnel in charge of minimizing the effects and serious consequences of the nuclear accident, received this recognition in the Concordia category.

Other winners of the Princess of Asturias are the Nintendo video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (2012) or the architect Shigeru Ban (2022).