Yang Yi wins Akutagawa Prize

According to The Japan Times and Mainichi, Yang Yi is the first Chinese novelist who won the Akutagawa Prize. A great lady.

Yomiuri : Mainichi closes controversial English-language Web page

Goodbye to WaiWai and Ryann Connell. "Too vulgar" and "inappropriate content", I see. And then what about this ?

Elizabeth Nash on Fernando Pessoa's manuscripts and letters

From The Independent (14.06.2008) :

The dossier includes voluminous correspondence with Crowley, and hundreds of pages of an unfinished novel about Crowley's faked suicide. The work is called Boca do Inferno, (Hell's Mouth) after a rocky inlet near the Portuguese resort of Cascais.

Pessoa, intrigued by Crowley's mysticism, struck up a correspondence with the Englishman. The flamboyant Crowley visited Lisbon in 1930, and the friends played chess together. Crowley then disappeared, leaving his cigarette case and a handwritten suicide note on the clifftop above the crashing waves at Hell's Mouth.

It was a trick, apparently to elude a discarded lover. Crowley slipped across the border to Spain, emerged weeks later in Berlin and died in Hastings, Sussex, in 1947, penniless and addicted to heroin. Pessoa mounted a polemical play about the "suicide" and doubts swirled over his role in the affair, and the nature of his relationship with Crowley.

When news of the sale emerged this week, experts said any bidding war would far exceed the budget of Lisbon's national library. The library's director, Jorge Couto, is reportedly seeking a deal with the family.

Via Fluctuat.net.

Bruce Wallace : A Japanese craftsman's one-man Olympic boycott

He's right, Mr. Tsujitani :

TOKYO -- Masahisa Tsujitani is getting a lot of attention these days for a man who has spent much of the last 40 years bent over a lathe in a garage workshop, where amid the sharp smell of burnt oil and iron he grinds out some of the finest 16-pound shots ever tossed by Olympic athletes.

But Tsujitani's cheerful face is showing up on Japanese television and in newspapers not because of what he does, but because of what he is refusing to do. After four Olympics in which his finely grooved iron balls were the shots of choice for most medalists, this Tokyo craftsman has told Chinese Olympic officials they will not be receiving any of his products at this summer's Beijing Games.

"This is a personal statement about my pride as a craftsman and how my work is used," said the fit 74-year-old, standing in his home's low-ceilinged garage surrounded by drill bits, the detritus of shorn metal and cardboard boxes filled with polished shots.

"I feel badly for the athletes who won't get to use my shots, but after Tibet I know I'm right," he said last week. "Enough is enough."

And I hope that French athletes will hold high the "Pour un monde meilleur" badge.

Michael McCarthy : Irvine Welsh to revive Sick Boy and Renton in 'Trainspotting' prequel

From The Independent (17.03.2008) :

Welsh has been prompted to write their beginnings by finding in his attic earlier material for Trainspotting, gathered but not used – much of it from his own years on Edinburgh's housing schemes. "The thing is basically a prequel and will be about how Renton and Sick Boy went from being daft, young guys just out for the buzz to total junkies," he said. "It focuses on them when they are a couple of years younger, and shows how their attitudes and behaviour start to change as they become more defined by the drug and the culture around it."

"I had a great deal of material that, for various reasons, namely pace and because it didn't fit the time frame, wasn't suitable for the previous books," he said. "There's a particular section about Renton and Sick Boy's first visit to London to stay with their friend Nicksy in Hackney that I always wanted to publish, but it was just a bit too long.

"The others are first and second drafts from 1991 based on the same diaries and notes as the original Trainspotting. I only found them as I've been looking through boxes that have been in the attic for years – and I thought they'd been slung out ages ago."