Naoki

The Naoki Prize is Japan's major award for popular fiction, named for the novelist Naoki Sanjugo, which means the name has been attached to literary aspiration for nearly a century without anyone involved setting out to make it so. Nao for honest or straight, ki for tree or radiance — the combination points toward something upright and clear, a name that sounds like what it claims to mean.

Author Naoki Higashida, whose memoir The Reason I Jump reached English readers through David Mitchell's translation, gave the name a particular resonance abroad: a voice for experience that had largely gone unrepresented, carried under a name that insists on directness. Two syllables, the opening nao broad, the ki landing with certainty. In Japan it reads as a solid, unfussy men's name, the kind worn by journalists and architects and the neighbor everyone trusts. Outside Japan it arrives fresh, the sounds easy, the meaning quietly impressive. A name that does not announce itself but holds up completely under examination.