Risa Wataya, the teenage Akutagawa winner behind the story in YOASOBI’s new NHK theme

Every weekday morning this autumn, millions of Japanese viewers hear a song that started as a short story by Risa Wataya. NHK commissioned her to write the source text for ‘Sakihokore’, the YOASOBI theme of the morning drama Blossom, which began at the end of September and follows a heroine modelled on the novelist Chiyo Uno. Wataya, a long-time admirer of Uno, called her story “Hana no inochi wa fumetsu nari”. The single arrived in mid-October. Days earlier, Shueisha published Ma, sajikagen desho., a collection of the essays she wrote for LEE magazine over four years, timed to mark a quarter-century since her debut. That anniversary goes back to a teenager who got very famous very fast and then spent the next two decades getting better.

Wataya grew up in a quiet residential district of Kyoto near Kinkaku-ji. Her mother taught English at a junior college and her father worked for a kimono company. As a small child she pestered her parents to read aloud to her. As a teenager she fell hard for Osamu Dazai and decided to become a writer. Her parents thought she was in her room studying for university entrance exams. She was writing a novella.

That novella was Install, about a high-school girl who drops out of school life and ends up, with the help of a primary-school boy, working an adult chat line from a computer. It won the 38th Bungei Prize in 2001, by a unanimous jury. Born on February 1, 1984, she was 17 and equalled the prize’s age record, which had stood for twenty years. In 2004 it became a film starring Aya Ueto. She entered Waseda University on the strength of that prize, and later wrote her thesis there on Dazai’s Run, Melos!.

Recommended ReadingYOASOBI’s Blossom theme ‘Sakihokore’ began as a story by novelist Risa Wataya

The second book changed the scale. Keritai senaka follows Hatsu, a first-year on the track team who cannot fit in, and her odd connection with Ninagawa, a classmate obsessed with a pop idol. Its famous opening, in which loneliness rings like a bell and Hatsu shreds a handout into thin strips to drown out the sound, split the Akutagawa jury: one judge called the prose baffling, the other nine backed it. In January 2004, at 19 and still a second-year student, Wataya won the 130th Akutagawa Prize, shared with Hitomi Kanehara, then 20, for Hebi ni piasu. She broke the record for the youngest winner, held since 1967 by Kenji Maruyama at 23. The March 2004 issue of Bungeishunju that printed both winning works sold a record 1.185 million copies, and Keritai senaka became the first Akutagawa winner since Ryu Murakami in 1976 to pass a million in hardback.

The media called her an idol of the literary world. She dealt with a stalker, stayed away from the promotion of the Install film, and then hit a wall. From her third year at university until 2010 she was stuck in a slump that lasted about six years. After a painful breakup she moved back to Kyoto and took jobs in a hotel, a clothes shop and a call centre while she kept writing. Yumewoataeru, her first full-length novel in three and a half years, appeared in 2007. Written in the third person, it follows Yuko from child model in a television commercial to national idol and then down through a scandal. WOWOW adapted it as a drama in 2015.

The real comeback was 勝手にふるえてろ in 2010. Its narrator is a 26-year-old office worker who has never had a relationship, torn between a real, slightly clumsy suitor and the classmate she has idolised in her head since junior high. Wataya’s voice was now funny and ruthless, close to the reader’s ear, and the book made her a bestselling novelist again rather than a famous former prodigy. かわいそうだね？, published in 2011, won the 6th Kenzaburo Oe Prize in 2012. The prize was chosen by the Nobel laureate alone, and that year he chose her.

Film directors found her through those books. Akiko Ohku’s Tremble All You Want, from 勝手にふるえてろ, won the Audience Award at the 2017 Tokyo International Film Festival and gave Mayu Matsuoka her first film lead. Ohku returned to Wataya with Hold Me Back, from Watashi o Kuitomete (2017), starring Non as Mitsuko, a woman happily single in her thirties who takes every decision to an adviser inside her head called A. It took the Tokyo festival’s Audience Award in 2020, the only prize given that year. Rin Shuto’s film of Hiraite, her 2012 novel of high-school obsession, followed in 2021.

Her later work has grown longer and stranger. Ki no mi ki no mama de (2019), a two-volume love story between two women, won the 26th Shimase Romance Literature Prize. Pakkipaki Pekin appeared in 2023, after she had spent about half a year living in Beijing from December 2022. In August 2025 Bungeishunju published Hageshiku kirameku mijikai inochi, her longest novel, revised from four years of serialisation. It follows two girls who meet at a Kyoto junior-high entrance ceremony at 13, are driven apart, and meet again in Tokyo at 32. In January 2026 Shogakukan published Greta Ninpu, a comedy about a quiet couple whose life turns upside down when the wife becomes pregnant after they had given up on fertility treatment.

Translations remain the gap. Wataya has appeared in German, Italian, French, Thai and Korean, and an English edition of Keritai senaka came out in 2015, but most of her books are still untranslated and the films have travelled further.

That makes the YOASOBI song a good way in. Wataya’s best books are about people who live mostly inside their own heads: the girl who wants to kick a boy’s back, the office worker still devoted to a classmate from junior high, the woman who consults the voice called A. ‘Sakihokore’ turns one of her stories into three minutes of orchestra and choir. The novels are where those inner voices get the room to talk.

Tags: novelists, writers, Risa Wataya, Hitomi Kanehara, Keritai senaka, Osamu Dazai

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