Bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has won this year’s Princess of Asturias Award for literature, the Spanish foundation that organizes the prizes said Wednesday

Japanese literature, the body of written works produced by Japanese authors in Japanese or, in its earliest beginnings, at a time when Japan had no written language, in the Chinese classical language. Both in quantity and quality, Japanese literature ranks as one of the major literatures of the world, comparable in age, richness, and volume to English literature, though its course of development has been quite dissimilar. The surviving works comprise a literary tradition extending from the 7th century ce to the present; during all this time there was never a “dark age” devoid of literary production. Not only do ...(100 of 12958 words)

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