Every October, in the years when we were students in Edinburgh, my friend Fraser placed a bet on Junichiro Tanizaki. The stake was a pint, the odds were nobody's business but his, and the wager had one small flaw, which was that Tanizaki had been dead since the July of 1965. Fraser was perfectly aware of it. He read Classics, and had absorbed from his subject a fondness for lost causes and a habit of ruling on them retrospectively. His position was that the Swedish Academy owed the man an apology, that an apology is not bound by the rules of eligibility, and that a pint laid on the right name in the wrong year was a fair way of keeping the account open.
I treated this for a long time as one of Fraser's eccentricities, like his opinions on Sophocles and on the correct temperature of beer. I have since gone through the Nobel Foundation's nomination archive, which opens its files once fifty years have passed, and I owe him a partial apology of my own. The archive lists seven nominations for Tanizaki, in 1958 and then in every year from 1960 to 1965. The first came from Pearl Buck, herself a laureate. The last two came from Harry Martinson, a member of the Swedish Academy who would receive the prize himself in 1974. Tanizaki died before the autumn announcement of 1965. A writer can be proposed by an Academician two years running, it seems, and still be left standing in the corridor.
This month's feature is about what a prize can tell a reader and what it cannot. The question is asked more loudly in October than at any other time, because the Nobel Foundation has announced that this year's literature prize will be named on Thursday 8 October, six days after these words appear. Whatever the announcement brings, a great many people will spend the afternoon treating a single name as a verdict on world literature. I should like to set down three reasons for reading that survive the afternoon, whichever name is read out.
The first reason is that a prize is a verdict, and a verdict reveals its judges. The literature prize is decided by the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy. They are serious readers, and they are also eighteen people, each with a temperament, a first language and a national shelf of prejudices. The prize has never claimed otherwise. Its aura sometimes does the claiming on its behalf.
The early decades make the temperament easy to see. Alfred Nobel's will asked for the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency, a phrase vague enough to start arguments that have not quite finished. The Foundation's own history of the prize records how the Academy of those years understood it: as a conservative idealism that held church, state and family sacred. That reading produced prizes for Bjørnson, Kipling and Heyse, and it turned away Tolstoy, Ibsen and Zola. Tolstoy was nominated for the literature prize in every year from 1902 to 1906 and never won. When the very first prize went to the French poet Sully Prudhomme in 1901, a group of Swedish writers and artists wrote to Tolstoy to say that in their view he ought to have been considered before anyone else. Prudhomme is, so far as my reading goes, rarely read today outside the history of poetry.
Tolstoy himself was unmoved. A note attached to one of his peace nominations in the archive records his wish not to receive a Nobel Prize and his readiness to decline one. There is a dry comedy in a committee passing over, year after year, a man who had already let it be known that he would say no.
I do not offer any of this as an argument for contempt. The Academy has chosen well often enough, and its members of a century ago were no more foolish than the rest of us are in our own decades. Nor is the matter merely historical. In 2018 the Academy, in the middle of an internal crisis, did not award the prize at all, and that year's laureate was named twelve months late, alongside the one for 2019. The books of 2018 had not paused to wait for the Academy to compose itself. My point is narrower than contempt. A verdict is evidence about the judges as much as about the book, and a reader who forgets that begins to mistake a room's taste for the shape of the literature.
The second reason is that the writers left out are not the lesser ones. The list of those who never received the prize is, on any fair reading, a better library than some lists of those who did. Tolstoy, Ibsen and Zola were passed over by the Academy's first generation. Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Woolf never won at all. Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote about libraries as though they were the whole of the universe, was nominated more than thirty times between 1956 and 1975 in the open record, and he died in 1986 without the prize. The archive keeps its files sealed for fifty years, so the later years are not yet visible, but the pattern of the visible ones is plain enough. A committee that meets once a year cannot honour everyone, and it has never tried to.
Each October the press, in Seoul and well beyond it, prints the bookmakers' odds as if they were a forecast. The Academy publishes nothing, and the archive stays sealed for fifty years, so the odds measure nothing but the gamblers' guesses about the temperament described above. It is Fraser's method with the pint replaced by money, and considerably less honest about its own absurdity.
The Japanese names make the point most sharply for a reader with my interests. Yasunari Kawabata received the prize in 1968, the first Japanese laureate, and few would now dispute the choice. Yet the archive for the same decade shows Tanizaki nominated in 1964 and 1965 by an Academy member, and Yukio Mishima proposed in 1964, 1965 and 1967 by that same Academician, Harry Martinson, and again in 1968 by Henry Olsson, also of the Academy. Mishima died in 1970. Neither man was a minor figure whom the Academy had failed to notice. Both were noticed, weighed and left on the shelf, which is a different thing from being missed.
Tanizaki would, I think, have appreciated the arrangement. In the early 1930s he wrote a short book, In Praise of Shadows, on the beauty of what lamplight leaves dim: the lacquer bowl glimpsed by candle, the alcove that is more than half dark, the gold that comes alive only when it is not fully lit. It is a complaint against glare. A prize is a lamp, and a lamp lights one thing a year. What it does to the rest of the room is precisely what Tanizaki describes, and the room is not less beautiful for the dimming.
The Korean version of the question has its own small history. The Korean press still describes Park Kyong-ni, author of Toji, as a writer once mentioned as a possible first Korean candidate for the prize. A news agency's report on the June events marking her centenary repeats the phrase, alongside the figures of twenty-six years and some twenty-nine thousand five hundred sheets of manuscript paper that the novel is said to have cost her. I can find no public record of a nomination, and the archive could not show one if it existed, since it has revealed nothing after 1975. 'Mentioned' is not 'nominated', and neither is 'awarded'. Toji has managed to be read for decades without waiting for the third.
There is a mild irony in the fifty-year rule. It means that the writers overlooked in our own time are, by design, invisible to us, whereas Tanizaki's disappointment stands on the public record. Somewhere in a sealed drawer in Stockholm there is a Korean or Japanese or Scottish name that Fraser's grandchildren may find agreeable to bet on. I do not know whose it is, which is the argument in miniature. The reader who waits for the verdict is always fifty years behind the reader who simply picks up the book.
The third reason is that a shelf built by hand holds what no committee would choose. A prize looks backwards and, in a manner of speaking, outwards. It asks what a life's work amounted to and what the world should agree about it. A reader looks sideways. The question is what this particular book, on this particular evening, does to this particular reader, and no committee has ever been placed to answer that. A committee must in addition agree with itself, which is a labour of compromise; a reader has no such obligation and can afford to be perverse. The books that mattered most to me arrived by no ceremony at all: a recommendation from a lecturer who had not read them himself, a spine noticed on a friend's shelf, a volume borrowed because the cover was ugly and the price was nothing. None carried a medal. Two of them were by writers who never received one.
It would be graceless to leave the prize out of the account entirely, since it can do a reader real service. In 2024 it went to Han Kang, the first Korean to receive it, and in 2025 to László Krasznahorkai, and I imagine that each announcement sent a fair number of people to shelves they would not otherwise have visited. That is the prize at its best: a lantern held up for one hour over one doorway. The doorway was there before the lantern, and the corridor beyond it is much longer than the light. A reader who understands this can enjoy the October announcement as one enjoys a good weather forecast, with interest and without surrendering the day's plans.
I confess that a few laureates whose names are printed in large type on the spines of my own shelves remain, to this day, unfinished, while The Makioka Sisters, which its author never saw honoured in Stockholm, has been read in this house often enough to loosen its binding. The Nobel Prize has no view on the matter. Neither, in the last analysis, does anyone else. A shelf is the one verdict that answers to a single reader, and it has the merit of being revisable every evening. I keep a small habit of my own. In the week of the announcement I take down one writer who never won, read a few chapters, and put the book back without a verdict. This year the shelf offers a generous choice.
Fraser still sends a postcard in the first week of October. It carries a single word in the same untidy hand, and the word has not changed since the first. I have never told him that the archive partly vindicates the wager, since he would only ask for the pint. This year the announcement falls on the eighth. I already know what the postcard will say, and I know that the stake, as always, will be laid on a man who is in no position to collect it.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Eumye Yechan (음예 예찬), Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English Edition: In Praise of Shadows, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker), Amazon
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Nobel Prize Outreach, Nomination Archive: Junichiro Tanizaki (seven literature nominations, 1958 to 1965), nobelprize.org.
- Nobel Prize Outreach, Nomination Archive: Jorge Luis Borges, nobelprize.org.
- Nobel Prize Outreach, The Nobel Prize in Literature (the Academy's guidelines and their interpretations), nobelprize.org.
- Newsis, Park Kyong-ni Was the Land of Korean Literature: Rereading Toji at Her Centenary (in Korean), 18 June 2026.