Fujisawa Shū 藤沢周. Buenos Aires gozen reiji ブエノスアイレス午前零時. Kawade Shobō, 1998.
This shared the 119th A-Prize, for early 1998. The pattern holds true: if the Prize is shared, then one work (in this case, Hanamura Mangetsu’s) will be experimental, challenging, or transgressive, while the other (in this case Fujisawa’s) will be more conventionally literary. I write that without value judgment.
Fujisawa Shū was born in 1959, making him nearly 40 when he won the Prize; he had debuted in 1994 and been a finalist three times before this. He’s from Niigata, and the winning story must be drawing on his experiences of snow country. It also seems to be exploiting the ‘90s fascination with ballroom dancing – this was two years after Shall We Dance? and six years after Strictly Ballroom. 
The title may be translated as “Midnight in Buenos Aires,” and refers to a tango written by Astor Piazzolla. The story, however, takes place in a dilapidated hot springs ryokan in northern Japan in the dead of winter; the ryokan has a large dance hall attached, and survives by booking group stays for ballroom dance clubs. One of the dances is, of course, the tango. The story’s effect depends on the contrast between the rustic, mundane reality of life in the backwoods of Niigata and the romantic, exotic image conjured up by the music played for the dancers. The dancers themselves tend to be retirees, and the story is told from the perspective of a young failed salaryman who ends up working at the ryokan, so there’s a contrast between desire and unfulfillment, youth and age, built into the story as well.
The protagonist, Kazama, grew up in the village where the ryokan is located; his father runs a tofu shop. Kazama had escaped to Tokyo to work in an ad agency, but for unspecified reasons has returned to the village. He works at the ryokan doing odd jobs; the most vivid descriptions come when he’s tending to the onsen tamago, eggs boiled in the inn’s natural hot spring. The rust color of the water and the sulphurous smell stick to the character, we’re told, and indeed permeate the story.
Kazama expects to inherit his father’s tofu shop at some point; this may be why he’s come back, although he doesn’t seem particularly excited by the prospect. He’s a fairly passive character, looking at his surroundings and the guests with disdain but no real animosity. In terms of late-‘90s literature he’s part of the post-Bubble phenomenon of men abandoning the salaryman life (datsusara), either out of choice or necessity, and also of the “U-turn” (the term is even invoked in the text) of people leaving the metropoles to return to their country roots. But his reasons and thoughts on his career situation are underdeveloped in the narrative; he’s a type, but the type is not the point.
The point, if there is one, is the peculiar relationship Kazama develops with one of the older women in the ballroom dance club, Mitsuko. Mitsuko is old and frail, nearly blind and receding into dementia; she’s there with her sister Yoshiko. The club is from Yokohama, and rumors say that Mitsuko had been a prostitute after the war; this may explain (or the rumor may have been an attempt to explain) why in her fugue state she often reminisces about an Argentine lover. He may be real or imagined, but either way he’s connected with her past – a past that speaks of a sexuality now obscured by age and feebleness.
Staff at the inn are expected to dance with guests, and Kazama dances with Mitsuko. The story culminates in a strangely sensual episode when they dance and Kazama becomes awkwardly aware of her breasts, the touch of her hands. He has a vision of love and sex in an exotic locale. And that’s pretty much it. The story consists in the contrasts between the Buenos Aires of Mitsuko’s past arousals or present delusions and the mundane Niigata of the present day, and in the unlikely but vivid sexual near-encounter between her and Kazama. It’s a story of suggestions and rumors rather than facts and actions.