Ishiguro's Nobel Prize win is another year of disappointment for Haruki Murakami fans

In Japan, there's a word to express the autumnal turning of the leaves – koya. But, as social media user Meganekko Keiba joked on Twitter yesterday, there's another tradition that marks the passage of the seasons: "When Haruki Murakami loses out on the Nobel literature prize and Harukists around the country all fall to their knees in disappointment, I feel autumn has come."

"Harukists" is a term given to those who follow the work, publications and acclaim of Japan's most eminent living author, Haruki Murakami. Every year, they gather to see if the Swedish academy will award him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Every year, they are disappointed.

Such were the events at a shrine in Tokyo on Wednesday evening, local time. The anticipatory party poppers remained un-pulled as 200 Harukists got together to see if 2017 would be the year for their beloved literary hero. Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported that a crowd of sighs erupted from the crowd, with polite applause following shortly after for Kazuo Ishiguro, who was named this year's Nobel Laureate.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, but left for the UK when he was five. While he is regarded as a British author by the Nobel Academy, and by the UK, because he writes in English and was educated at Kent University and the University of East Anglia, Japan has claimed Ishiguro as their own. 

Even so, his victory is of little comfort to the Harukists, who enjoy sipping whisky and listening to jazz, to ape the scenes envisaged and enjoyed by their favourite author. If anything, Wednesday's events should hold considerable déjàvu for Murakimi's fans; in 2012 they gathered at a bar, holding copies of his books and framed photographs of the author, convinced that this was "his year". It proved not to be, with Mo Yan, a Chinese author, earning the accolade instead. 

Despite the annual disappointment, Harukists remain optimistic. And, in some cases, with good reason. While the city's Kinokuniya flagship bookshop may be considering re-arranging its display of more 30 Murakami novels, they can be reassured that they will sell. As Murakami told The New Yorker in 2012: "Every book I publish, even before it is promoted or reviewed, it sells three hundred thousand copies in Japan."