Novelist Akira Otani made history this week, becoming the first Japanese winner of the best translated crime novel prize at the Dagger Awards. Her triumph was announced by the United Kingdom’s Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) on July 3.
The Night of Baba Yaga, translated by Sam Bett, was competing against five other novels, including Butter by fellow Japanese author Asako Yuzuki. Otani’s novel is a queer thriller that follows Yoriko Shindo, a fierce mixed-race fighter who becomes the bodyguard of a yakuza princess.
Although several acclaimed works by Japanese writers — such as Hideo Yokoyama, Kotaro Isaka and Keigo Higashino — have been shortlisted for the Dagger Award’s translation category over the years, none have received the prize.
courtesy of Kawade Shobo Shinsha
Embracing Ambiguity in Fiction and Life
Born in Tokyo in 1981, Otani began her career as a video game writer. Her debut in the literary world came in 2018 with Nobody Said We’re Perfect, a short story collection that explores relationships between women. The Night of Baba Yaga, her fourth feature-length novel published in Japan, was the first to be translated into English in 2024. The translated work was featured in Tokyo Weekender’s 2024 book recommendations list.
“I feel that the depiction of women in fiction is often fixed and unrealistic, with only a few patterns,” Otani said in an interview with Shueisha Bungei Station. “Real friends and acquaintances are more diverse and interesting than that… I decided to portray real women in my stories.”
Otani also discussed the importance of embracing gray areas in relation to her own identity as a writer during her acceptance speech at the Dagger Award Ceremony in London. “I am not a mystery writer. I write a variety of works,” she stated, in reference to the segmentation of authors by genre in Japan. “Ambiguity is what defines me as a writer. I believe that accepting your own ambiguity and acknowledging the ambiguity of others will make the world a better place.”
There are over 38,000 copies of The Night of Baba Yaga in Japan as of today, and the novel is currently available in the United Kingdom, United States and South Korea, with plans to publish in Germany, Italy and Brazil.
The Rise of Translated Japanese Fiction
Otani’s work is one of a number of Japanese novels to have enjoyed great success in the United Kingdom in recent years. According to figures from Nielsen BookScan, Japanese fiction represented 25% of all translated fiction sales in the UK in 2022. Last November, The Guardian reported that 43% of the top 40 translated fiction titles in the UK for 2024, up to that point, were by Japanese authors.
While literary giants such as Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami are no strangers to overseas fame, the past decade has witnessed the global rise of a broader range of Japanese authors. Literary fiction titles from female perspectives by writers such as Sayaka Murata (Convenience Store Woman) and Mieko Kawakami (Breasts and Eggs) have surged in popularity, as have slice-of-life comfort fiction novels like Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking for Is in the Library.
There has also been a huge growth in classic and contemporary crime fiction from Japan in the UK market, including Yuzuki’s aforementioned bestseller Butter and golden age crime novels such as Seicho Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express (also known as Points and Lines).
