Abstract
Twenty-nine-year-old Kenji Nakagami was working as a baggage handler at Haneda Airport in 1976 when his novella, "The Cape," was awarded the Akutagawa Sho, Japan's premier literary prize. Nakagami, who was born into Japan's outcast burakumin society, was the first in his family to "get letters." In his writing, he concentrated on the hardscrabble life of the people in his community: his stories of the roji (alley) are populated by ditchdiggers, prostitutes, gamblers, bums, and drug addicts. There are no cherry blossoms or whispered haiku in The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto, but instead sweaty armpits, pig piss, and bloody knives. Nakagami's fictional world is dirty realism at its grimiest.
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