Imperial Syntax: Nakagami Kenji's " Monogatari " and Modern Japanese Literature as Ethnography

Abstract

The life and work of fiction-writer Nakagami Kenji are often bracketed in terms of firsts and lasts: a hyperbole that has served his career for both ill and good. Born in 1946, Nakagami was the first writer born after the Pacific War to enter the literary star system by winning the prestigious Akutagawa prize for his first novel, Misaki (The cape, 1976). 1 His apprenticeship as a writer departs from the path illustrated by his college-educated predecessors, such as Nobel prize-winner Oe Kenzaburo. Nakagami neither majored in French, nor even went to college, much less to Tokyo University. Like Oe, Nakagami came from a small town known for its straight-talking dialect speech. But he worked as a manual laborer, a luggage handler at Haneda airport, during the years he wrote and workshopped small press fiction at the magazine Bungei shuto (Literary capital) . Although his works include long and short fiction, film scripts, manga scripts, essays and fieldwork-based reportage, Nakagami is known largely for his Kishu saga (1976-1983), a set of interlocking novels and stories set in a family construction business in a folklor-