Hanamura Mangetsu 花村萬月. Gerumaniumu no yoru ゲルマニウムの夜. Bungei Shunjū, 1998.
This shared the 119th A-Prize, for early 1998. Hanamura, born in 1955, was already a fairly well established writer by this point, having debuted in 1989 and won several prizes. However, he had been pegged as a popular-fiction writer – he’d been a Naoki Prize finalist twice – before this story won the A-Prize.
When first published in magazine form the story consisted of two parts: the first shared its subtitle with the story as a whole – “Germanium Night” – while the second was subtitled Ōkoku no inu 王国の犬, “The Kingdom’s Dog.” When published as a book the two parts were formally separated into distinct stories. By the time the paperback came out they’d been augmented by a third, and the whole book was given the subtitle, Ōkokuki I 王国記Ⅰ, “Chronicles of the Kingdom I.” As of 2025 there are nine books in this series. Gerumaniumu no yoru was filmed in 2005; the overseas release title is The Whispering of the Gods. I’ve only read the original “Germanium Night” story (stories) and I haven’t seen the film; I’ll be considering the story as a self-contained work. 
Germanium is a semi-rare earth; in the context of the story it’s the crystal in an old crystal radio kit the narrator buys. He’s listening to it on the first, fateful night of the story. The “Kingdom” in the title of the second part is the Kingdom of God. The story is told by Rō, a guy in his early 20s living in a Catholic-run orphanage with its own farm attached. He was raised there, then left when he aged out, but has now come back to hide from the law, having murdered two people on the outside. The story follows Rō’s violent behavior on the inside, as he gradually brings the place under his thumb – the implication at the end is that it’s his kingdom, not God’s.
Elements of the story appear to be drawn from the author’s own life – he spent some time in a similar facility as a boy, and he also seems to have spent time on the streets in his 20s, although presumably the crimes he depicts were not his own. Rō is also depicted as the victim of sexual abuse by the foreign priest who runs the establishment; whether or not this is drawn from the author’s life, it certainly reflects the Catholic church abuse scandals that were making global headlines in the late ‘90s. And one way to read the story is as a dissection of an institution that creates, and then makes a space for, violent and twisted characters like Rō.
We learn very little about Rō’s murders – they seem to have come from a failed sexual encounter that led to a woman and her partner ridiculing him and Rō lashing out. He seems to feel no guilt about them; he also doesn’t seem to fear the authorities tracking him down. Within this story, at least, he’s safe – but clearly damaged. He lets the reader know he was abused as a child, and is clearly angry about that; it’s obvious that this rage has been turned against the world. But Rō doesn’t seem to clearly understand that himself. He narrates as if he’s in total control of himself, but then is surprised by his own sexual urges.
A great deal of the story centers on his sexual hang-ups. The story begins with him watching one male pig raping another, and while Rō doesn’t admit to any same-sex attraction it’s clear he’s both aroused and disturbed by the scene. He’s still a virgin, and can’t help but conflate virginity in himself and in those around him with the image of the Virgin Mary. And he insists to himself that he’s never been interested in female genitals; but at the time he fetishizes women in tight clothing, and when he encounters an aspirant sister in a tight skirt, he’s overcome with desire. They have sex in a tractor a number of times. Later he encounters an older foreign nun who works in the school, and he exposes himself to her; at the end of the story he has sex with her. Narratively it doesn’t appear that either of these relationships are rape – both women seem to be willing – but since Rō is Catholic and they’re an aspirant and a nun he feels that he’s violated both of them. And that’s in large part what turns him on.
Rō wants to dominate in other ways, too. He enacts a particularly horrifying assault on another young man who lives and works in the institution, seemingly just so he can establish himself as the alpha. By the end Rō is the unofficial leader among the boys. This suggests the subtitle of the second half; Rō makes other members of the Kingdom his dogs (his “bitches,” an English-speaker might say), but he himself is the Kingdom’s dog, in that he can only exercise his dominance within this closed-off space.
In short, while the narrator doesn’t connect the dots, the reader is likely to assume that Rō is someone who was damaged by clerical abuse as a child, who has now grown up to inflict similar abuse and violence on others, but in such a way that he can’t separate his spiritual aspirations from his desire to violate others and, in them, the church itself. He seems to sort of believe in God, or at least yearn to – there’s a curious confessional scene near the end where another priest (who does not seem to have abused him) tells Rō that he was always the most promising one.
That’s the most palatable reading of the book; it’s the easiest way to find redeeming qualities in it. But to be honest it doesn’t read like a critique of clerical abuse; it feels much more like a celebration of Rō’s nihilism. It’s a book that revels, not just in violence, but in images of filth and degradation (rotting food scraps, piles of pesticided caterpillars, a gutted pig), and in that context it feels as if we’re supposed to see Rō as a dark hero rather than as a symptom. It doesn’t help that, however much it may be drawn from the author’s own experiences, the depictions of Catholicism and Catholics in the book are never more than crude stereotypes. If the book works as a critique of clerical abuse, then it’s almost incidental to what feels like the book’s true aim, which might be more aesthetic than sociopolitical.