So fans didn't get to dance on the street. The two moons of Haruki Murakami were eclipsed when he didn't win the Nobel Prize in literature, as the Japanese man seemed the only writer on the speculated shortlist capable of inspiring global adulation from admirers, including in Thailand, had Stockholm given him the call on Thursday.
Well, him and perhaps E L James, given that her Fifty Shades of Gravy (or is it Grey?) has topped every bestselling list on the planet for the past 12 months.
I believe art awards say more about the giver than about the recipient, but the fact that bookies included James on the possible winners' list prior to the announcement was the blackest literary joke of the year (her odds were 500/1, but still, besides the sticky Gravy itself, the Swedish Academy has given the prize to only 44 women in the past 90 years).
First: Felicitations to Mo Yan. In my ignorance I never read him, just like I never read a number of the Nobel laureates, dead and alive. And it says a lot about how we satisfy our fix of narrative when many, many more people have seen Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum than those who've read its source novel by Mo. Those who say books are dead are dumb, but to say that the century of letters has been replaced by the epoch of visual have an inkling of the truth. The public get a greater high off the Oscars than off the Nobel Prize in literature, or closer to home, the SEA Write Award.
Book burning is rare, but films inflame riots. Children understand movies before they do letters - and maybe, more and more, the influence, the hierarchy of narrative comprehension, is greater with film than literature.
Back to the Nobel. It is not my intention to beat pots and pans and debunk Swedish taste when the results don't match my expectations (or my dreams, covered in fog). But since people even argue over a demonstrable football result, the Nobel warrants some debate. I will just say it now that I rooted for Alice Munro, one of the names that have cropped up in the past week - no, in the past few years. Munro's sensitive, sad, unpretentious and quietly luminous short stories are the highest literary achievement, the kind of relationship stories that make Fifty Shades of Gravy look just like, well, gravy, soiled on a water bed in a room full of amateur masochists, singing nursery rhymes.
Even though there would be only gasps slipped out in disbelief and not the worldwide jubilation of two-moon believers, I think that in the years to come, Munro should get it before Murakami. The Love of a Good Woman soothes us much more than the paralleled universes of IQ84.
That we're talking about this means we care about the Nobel prizes. The fact that Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Borges and Twain - writers who didn't simply pull rabbits out of a hat but who went to hell and returned with fire-breathing rabbits - were passed up by the Nobel is enough for us to stop caring so much, only that we can't.
From the US, the conga line of sarcasm sounded immediately on Thursday night; the last American to win was Toni Morrison, 19 years ago, and Philip Roth, a perennial favourite, still didn't get that Swedish stamp of eternal glory.
"The Plot Against America," headlined a Vanity Fair web article, borrowing from a Roth novel, barely one hour after the announcement.
From China, reports have come in of a surprisingly hearty reaction, official and popular, and about the simmering heatwave of criticism. The People's Daily wrote that the win heralds "a comfort ... an affirmation... a new starting point", while Chinese websites have been abuzz with excitement at the international recognition of Chinese literature. But sounding the horn of alarm and misgiving is Ai Weiwei, who's come out to vehemently question Mo's seeming indifference towards the fate of another Chinese Nobel laureate, the jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. "The Nobel organisers have removed themselves from reality [by awarding Mo]," Ai was quoted as saying.
In the past, the Chinese government often jeered at the prize as a propaganda tool of the West. And now, the anti-government camp is throwing the same rock. While the Swedish Academy repeatedly says that this is a strictly literary honour, the inevitable magnitude of geopolitics has always complicated the matter. A Chinese friend in Bangkok said to me: "Mo's works have been banned before... but some people in China are joking how come the Swedes can read Chinese, and that a Chinese was chosen only because of the country's growing significance."
Well, all this wouldn't have happened had the Fifty Shades of Grey author won. Kidding. That would be a real scandal.
Kong Rithdee is a Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post