IF THE hype building up around her is anything to go by, Natsu Minami is going to be the Zadie Smith of Japanese literature.

Since winning the Bungei Prize two months ago, Machineguns of the Heisei Era, Miss Minami’s novel about the murderous fantasies of a lonely schoolgirl, has aroused intense literary excitement.

Critics have praised the novel’s long, rhythmic sentences and cool treatment of the themes of school bullying and violence. Next week it will be published nationwide with an initial print run of 20,000, high for a first novel.

Despite many requests, there will be no author interviews, readings or book-signing tours. For Natsu Minami is a 15-year-old schoolgirl and, on her parents’ insistence, she is diligently revising for her exams.

Her success is not an isolated phenomenon; in the past two years Japanese fiction has been dominated by writers who are not merely young, but children. It is not just that their work has been published, with enormous media interest and high sales; they have also won some of Japan’s most important literary prizes.

The trend began last year when the Akutagawa Prize, the pre-eminent Japanese literary award, was awarded to Risa Wataya and Hitomi Kanehara. Both were female, attractive, and 19 and 20 years old, respectively. In Japan, 20 is the age of majority, and at the time they were Japan’s youngest literary award-winners. Two years later, compared with the latest crop of newcomers, they are looking almost middle-aged.

Last January Manami Kawasaki won the Shogakukan prize with To You, a love story she wrote at the age of 15. “I’m more mature than my Mum, mentally speaking,” she told an interviewer. “Biological age does not mean anything.”

But Miss Kawasaki and Miss Minami have both been trumped by Miko Mizuta, who won the Terrific Mystery Prize with Pierrot the Murderer’s Island School Reunion. Miss Mizuta (the name is a pseudonym) is a 13-year old Osaka schoolgirl who wrote her novel about a serial killer at the age of 12.

“It is often said that at the age of 10 you are the child of God, at 15 you are a genius, and after 20 you are just an ordinary person,” she said. “So I want to write while I’m the child of God or a genius.”

The great names of Japanese literature always seem to peak younger than their English-speaking counterparts. The Nobel prize-winning Kenzaburo Oe and the late Yukio Mishima achieved fame in their early twenties. “This is an era that is generating new young talent,” Hiroyuki Naito, a senior publisher at the Japanese house of Kodansha, says. He points to the surge of online diaries and weblogs. “Through these new media, young people come to realise that they share opinions and ways of thinking, and that motivates them to write.”

Why, then, are all the youngest of the recent prizewinners female? Is it a coincidence that several of them are extremely attractive? Cynics have an alternative explanation for the teen chick-lit boom: the simple fact that books by pretty girls attract more attention than those of the elderly and middle-aged.

There is no doubt that some of the winners have much merit, not least Ms Kanehara, whose Snakes & Earrings was published in English translation this year. There is disagreement about the others, though.

“No matter how young and pretty, or how great her potential, I do not want to listen to (the equivalent of) a tone-deaf singer,” Hitoshi Yoshino said of Miss Mizuta. Mr Yoshino was one of the judges of the Terrific Mystery Prize.

None of this seems to bother the author, whose novel will be published next year. “I have not spoken about the prize to my friends or my teachers,” Miss Mizuta said. “I told my mother secretly, but the first thing she said was, ‘Give me the prize money’. I said, ‘No way. Not even half’.”

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