Nakagami Kenji Research Articles

Paradox and Representation: Silenced Voices in the Narratives of Nakagami Kenji by Machiko Ishikawa

Paradox and Representation: Silenced Voices in the Narratives of Nakagami Kenji by Machiko Ishikawa

나카가미 겐지 『고목탄』론 : 부권적 지배 방식의 모순을 폭로하는 여성을 중심으로

본고는 나카가미가 그의 작품에서 혐오된 여성 이미지만을 제시한다는 특이점에 착안하여 “왜 혐오하는가?”에 대한 의문에서 출발했으며, 그러한 이미지가 발하는 메시지를 탐색하는 데 집중했다. 그 결과 가부장제의 요구에 맞게 잘 반죽되어진 여성들, 다시 말해 남성 중심 지배 구조 하에서 주체성을 인정받지 못하는 억압 상태의 여성들을 발견할 수 있었다. 그러나 그러한 여성들이 가부장제의 강화 존속을 위해 도구화된 존재에만 머무는 것이 아니라, 지배 구조의 폭력과 모순을 폭로하는 존재로 확장되고 있음을 파악하고, 부권적 지배 방식의 모순을 폭로하는 나카가미의 저항 즉 혐오된 ‘여성 이미지’에 집중했다. 혐오된 여성 이미지는 ‘폭력의 결과물’이라는 점에서 그 폭력을 폭로하는 ‘실체’라는 점을 역이용한 것이다. 『고목탄』의 궁극적 요구처럼 오늘날의 혐오되는 수많은 것에 대한 다각적 접근이 중요해지는 이유는 지금 우리 사회의 ‘지배’와 ‘피지배’, ‘차별’과 ‘피차별’, ‘주류’와 ‘비주류’, ‘다수’와 ‘소수’, ‘갑’과 ‘을’ 등으로 표현되는 관계에서 필연적으로 발생하는 다양한 ‘폭력’에 대한 재고로 이어지기 때문이다.

A Study of Nakagami Kenji’s Misaki - Focused on ‘Mother’ as a minority

A Study of Nakagami Kenji’s Misaki - Focused on ‘Mother’ as a minority

Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity , and: Negotiating Identity: Nakagami Kenji’s Kiseki and the Power of the Tale (review)

Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity , and: Negotiating Identity: Nakagami Kenji’s Kiseki and the Power of the Tale (review)

Negotiating Identity: Nakagami Kenji's Kiseki and the Power of the Tale , and: Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity (review)

Negotiating Identity: Nakagami Kenji's Kiseki and the Power of the Tale , and: Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity (review)

Nakagami Kenji's 'Writing Back to the Centre' through the Subaltern Narrative: Reading the Hidden Outcast Voice in 'Misaki' and Karekinada

The aim of this thesis is to give a post-colonial reading of selected narratives by Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992). Nakagami was the first Akutagawa Prize winning novelist from Japan’s outcaste Burakumin group. Through the production of narrative about this subaltern community, Nakagami confronted the exclusionary systems of hegemonic Japanese thought and the structures created by these systems which deny the principle and lived experience of ‘difference’. Borrowing the post-colonial concept of ‘writing back’ to the hegemonic centre from the work of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back, this article will analyse Nakagami’s ‘Misaki’ (1976, The Cape), and its sequel, Karekinada (1977, The Sea of Withered Trees). The principal focus will be on Nakagami’s representation of the hidden voice of those on the margins of Japanese society. This approach will position the Burakumin as ‘subalterns’ to the mainstream Japanese society on the basis of Antonio Gramsci’s view of the group. The analysis of ‘Misaki’ and Karekinada will begin with an investigation of Kishu Kumano as a site on the margins of mainstream Japanese society. In analysing these two novels as subaltern narratives, close attention will be given to Nakagami’s use of intertextuality particularly with oral kishu ryuritan folklore.

This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud (review)

Reviewed by: This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud Eve Zimmerman This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud. By Margherita Long. Stanford University Press, 2009. 200200 pages. Hardcover $50.00. Margherita Long's study of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro is a welcome addition to the body of work on this author in English. As a devoted reader of Tanizaki since graduate school, I have often felt that the historicist/biographical approach to his writings falls short of the mark. We need more help in understanding the dedicated masochism of Tanizaki's works and the part played by women in those visions. The notion that woman is simply other—mistress, mother, whore or a little bit of all three—becomes clichéd to the point of tedium. Why do we continue to read Tanizaki, and with such anticipation and pleasure? Long's answer to this question is complex, offering rigorous textual readings and demonstrating a strong command of her sources. She reads psychoanalytically and without apology. Early in the book she tackles the question of the relevance of psychoanalysis to Japan and answers in the affirmative. She asserts that Tanizaki's discoveries not only anticipate or replicate Freud's, but that they critique modern subjectivity itself. Long avoids most of Tanizaki's canonical works even as she writes a study of him; her method is to unearth the less-studied works, including fiction, essays, and discussions, and to observe how Tanizaki's texts interact with other central texts in Japan's modern history. In chapter 1, for example, [End Page 364] she gives a reading of In Praise of Shadows (In'ei Raisan) and its purported "return to the East." Long uses Freud's idea of moral masochism to unlock Tanizaki's project. Rather than stand as a defiant assertion of Eastern aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows delineates the process by which an internalized superego in the form of a stern Western father figure makes a weaker Japan suffer. Long locates this suffering in the racial humiliation implied by shadowy rooms, grimy objects, and women's dark skin. This is not to say that Tanizaki resists this masochism, but he is the only culturalist writer of the 1930s to expose its mechanism. Long's range of sources in this discussion is dizzying, from Slavoj Žižek to Komori Yoichi to Jacques Lacan and back again, and at times I wished for less, not more. Nevertheless, Long makes an original contribution to our understanding of Tanizaki's writing: she effectively argues that it is a critique, albeit a nuanced one, of modernity itself. My favorite chapter in the book is chapter 3, "Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name: The Language of Abjection in Arrowroot, Nakagami, and Irigaray." Using Luce Irigaray's observations on the mother's body, Long compares Tanizaki's position toward the maternal realm with the attitude of the much younger Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992). Long argues against Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection because it debases the mother, thus perpetuating the process by which "mother" is erased from the symbolic order. Following Irigaray, Long proposes an alternate role of mother as the element that breaks into the semiotic order through "a relational ethics of skins, membranes, petals, leaves, and finally mucous" (p. 70). In a reading of Tanizaki's novella Yoshinokuzu (Arrowroot, 1931), Long locates "Tanizaki's determination to write a different relation to maternal origin" (p. 83). Here, she productively uses Japanese literature to shift our understanding of psychoanalytic concepts. And herein lies the real strength of the book: instead of moving from West to East in terms of epistemic paradigms, Long makes a move in the opposite direction. Through Tanizaki's reinstatement of the mother, Long also reconsiders an important feminist thinker whose work has at times been criticized for being essentialist and utopian. Equally instructive is Long's explanation for a truism about Nakagami's work: despite Nakagami's consciousness of the brutal oppression of burakumin—the "polluted" and thus feared class of outcasts—by majority Japanese, his texts are dotted with scenes of the violent subjugation of women. Although Nakagami recognizes the importance of the mother in his...

Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction. By Eve Zimmerman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. x, 263 pp. $39.95 (cloth).

Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction. By Eve Zimmerman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. x, 263 pp. $39.95 (cloth).

Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction Rachel DiNitto (bio) Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction. By Eve Zimmerman. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2007. xii, 263 pages. $39.95. Nakagami Kenji is a touchstone for powerful, physical writing, violent mythologies, and political action. As a literary persona and historical figure, who arguably entered the realm of the mythical himself after his death in 1992, Nakagami is almost too much for any one book to contain. He remains one of the most compelling figures in modern Japanese literary history. The Japanese criticism of Nakagami that coalesced after his death served to canonize his Akiyuki series (Misaki, Karekinada, and Chi no hate shijōno toki). Critics such as Karatani Kōjin, who were also personal friends of Nakagami, theorized the role of narrative and traditional tales (monogatari) in Nakagami’s battles with the codes of Japanese literature and history. In their focus on his more strictly literary works, these critics reinforced (perhaps inadvertently) the traditional shishōsetsu (I-novel) link between author and subject, between Nakagami and Akiyuki as products of the buraku (outcaste neighborhood). Within English-language scholarship, critics have looked at the canon and beyond, to his poetry, short stories, and nonfictional works such as Kishū: ki no kuni ne no kuni monogatari. Their approaches have ranged from the feminist to the anthropological to the socially conscious. This work has yielded an examination of issues such as the violence in Nakagami’s fiction, especially that directed at women; the influence of structuralist-and poststructuralist-inspired fieldwork on his nonfiction; and the relationship between Nakagami and the buraku liberation struggles that coincided with his career. Critics are divided over this last point, some taking Nakagami to task for his lack of social realism and failure to break down prejudice and others arguing strenuously for maintaining a distinction between Nakagami’s writing, his narrative topos, and the real buraku. Nakagami’s own stance on this issue was ambiguous; he struggled to give voice to the buraku alleyways but bristled at the censorship of the Buraku Liberation League. [End Page 385] Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction is a welcome addition to this critical oeuvre. Eve Zimmerman takes a self-termed “ethnographic” approach to the study of the author, combining textual and biographical readings of the canonical and noncanonical in Nakagami’s fiction, nonfiction, and criticism from the 1970s and 1980s. She argues that we read Nakagami for his representation of the underside of the postwar economic recovery, for his engagement with the world and world literature, for his shaping of the literary world of 1970s and 1980s Japan, for his transformation of modern Japanese literature, for his buraku origins and the complexity he brings to the issue of minority identity, but perhaps most importantly because we “cannot go around him” (p. 2). In positioning herself amidst the debates over Nakagami’s work, Zimmerman carefully treads the line between author and subject. In arguing that the physical, actual buraku and the “imaginary topos” are “mutually determining elements of an equation that lies at the heart of Nakagami’s creative process,” she consciously weaves together these divergent strands of Nakagami criticism, because to privilege one would risk losing Nakagami’s own story (p. 9). Rather than question the authenticity of Nakagami’s work via the vectors of buraku writing or “literature,” Zimmerman takes a triangular approach, looking at the connections between text, author, and outside world. Her suggestion that we pay attention to the cacophony of voices that spills out from his fictional buraku alleyways (roji) is reflected in her ethnographic approach. Out of the Alleyway combines close readings and literary analysis with Zimmerman’s own fieldwork: her visits to Kumano and personal interviews with Nakagami, his family, neighbors, and fellow burakumin. At its most compelling, Out of the Alleyway shows Nakagami to be a writer who was constantly recreating himself and willing himself into being through his words. In her own highly readable, powerful prose, Zimmerman teaches us something about the value and productivity of reading with an eye to the author...

Chasing the tails of tales: Nakagami Kenji and the end of folklore

Chasing the tails of tales: Nakagami Kenji and the end of folklore

Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction (review)

Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction (review)

Out of the alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the poetics of outcaste fiction

The writer Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992) rose to fame in the mid-1970s for his vivid stories about a clan scarred by violence and poverty on the underside of the Japanese economic miracle. Drawing upon the lives, experiences, and languages of the burakumin, the outcaste communities long discriminated against in Japanese society as a defiled underclass, Nakagami's works of fiction and non-fiction record with vitality and violence the realities - actual and imagined - of buraku culture.In this critical study of Nakagami's life and oeuvre, Eve Zimmerman delves into the writer's literary world, exploring the genres, forms, and themes with which Nakagami worked and experimented. These chapters trace the biographical thread running through his works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.By bringing to the fore the literary urgency and social engagement that informed all aspects of Nakagami's creative and intellectual production, from his works of prose and poetry to his criticism, this book argues eloquently and effectively for us to appreciate Nakagami as a distinctive and relevant voice in modern Japanese literature.

Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Culture: A Reading of Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kōjin (review)

Reviewed by: Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Culture: A Reading of Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kōjin Atsuko Ueda (bio) Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Culture: A Reading of Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kōjin. By Murakami Fuminobu. Routledge, London, 2005. xiii, 206 pages. £65.00. This book, with its daunting title, prompts us to rethink the status of theory in our academic practices. It provokes us to reconsider theoretical issues that many of us, perhaps naively, thought were behind us. What does it mean for us to "use" theory, as the author claims to do in this book? What determines theory to be "Western" and "non-Western"? What assumptions underlie the question of whether "Euro-American theory" is applicable to non-Western cultures? The theoretical focus of the work is made abundantly clear in the title and the pages of the book. Yet, from the beginning, I was puzzled at a basic level: what constitutes "theory" for the writer? This question arose as I read the introductory chapter entitled "Western Ideologies and Japan." A subsection on "Postmodernism, Feminism, Postcolonialism and Japan" includes a cursory discussion of "Euro-American studies on Japan based on Western postmodern perspectives," as well as a discussion of Euro-American theory in Japan (p. 11). On "Euro-American studies on Japan," the author refers to Postmodernism and Japan, Japanese Encounters with Postmodernity, and Multicultu-ral Japan, along with John W. Treat's work on Yoshimoto Banana and Susan Napier's book The Fantastic and Modern Japanese Literature.1 Murakami then claims the following: "However, other than these studies, as far as I know, no serious attempt has yet been made to use Euro-American theories of postmodernism, feminism and postcolonialism to analyse contemporary Japanese literature in English" (p. 12). I probably do not have to list specific works to contradict such a statement for readers of The Journal of Japanese Studies, nor do I have enough space to list them all. [End Page 251] However, it would be too easy to say that the author did not conduct sufficient archival research or that he is merely ignorant of Japanese literary studies in the Euro-American context. There must be some of that too, but more important is the way such a characterization exposes his view of what constitutes theory. His statement prompts an interesting question: when does theory constitute itself as theory in our academic practices? For the author, it appears that a work needs to overtly claim a certain theoretical framework, such as postcolonial theory or feminism, for it to display its theoretical engagement. Theory, in other words, must be named as such for Murakami to recognize it as theory. Otherwise, I cannot explain the absence of many works on Nakagami Kenji, ōe Kenzaburō, ōba Minako, Yamada Eimi, and others from the list above, nor his outlandish comments, such as "After the early 1980s postmodernism had little impact in Japan" (p. 13), and "other aspects of postmodernism . . . such as its critique of rationalism, power systems, the structure of discrimination, and utopian/dystopian worlds, have not been given sufficient attention in Japanese postmodern literary criticism" (p. 13). It is certainly not valid to claim that Japanese postmodern literary criticism has not paid enough attention to such issues. Consider, for example, the extensive amount of study on the nation-state and its ideology in the 1980s and 1990s, studies that analyzed the nation's oppressive scheme, structures of power, and the modern systems of discrimination. Similarly, Murakami claims that "it was . . . only in 1996 that a round-table discussion . . . entitled 'What is the Postcolonial Thought' took place and introduced Euro-American postcolonial thought to Japan" (p. 15). His discussion precludes much scholarship on Okinawan and Ainu studies, as well as resident Korean studies that were widespread before the round table took place. Clearly lacking from the author's notion of theory is the notion that theory is inscribed in the language we mobilize to analyze texts. It is further inscribed in the gaze of the analyzing subject, which manifests not only in how we approach our objects of inquiry...

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

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-

A Companion to magical realism

This new Companion to Magical Realism provides an assessment of the world-wide impact of a movement which was incubated in Germany, flourished in Latin America and then spread to the rest of the world. It provides a set of up-to-date assessments of the work of writers traditionally associated with magical realism such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in particular his recently published memoirs), Alejo Carpentier, Miguel ngel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel and Salman Rushdie, as well as bringing into the fold new authors such as W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Jose Saramago, Dorit Rabinyan, Ovid, Maria Luisa Bombal, Ibrahim al-Kawni, Mayra Montero, Nakagami Kenji, Jose Eustasio Rivera and Elias Khoury, discussed for the first time in the context of magical realism. BR>Written in a jargon-free style, and with all quotations translated into English, this book offers a refreshing new interdisciplinary slant on magical realism as an international literary phenomenon emerging from the trauma of colonial dispossession. The companion also has a Guide to Further Reading. Stephen Hart is Professor of Hispanic Studies, University College London and Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru. Wen-chin Ouyang lectures in Arabic Literature and Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

Shifting discourses: a comparative study of Nakagami Kenji's style to those of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Murasaki Shikibu, and William Faulkner

Shifting discourses: a comparative study of Nakagami Kenji's style to those of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Murasaki Shikibu, and William Faulkner

Nakagami Kenji and the Buraku issue in postwar Japan

(2003). Nakagami Kenji and the Buraku issue in postwar Japan. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 220-231.

Writing the limits of sexuality: Tomioka Taeko's 'Straw Dogs' and Nakagami Kenji's 'The Immortal'

Writing the limits of sexuality: Tomioka Taeko's 'Straw Dogs' and Nakagami Kenji's 'The Immortal'

Hell at home: Nakagami Kenji and the discovery of Arthur Rimbaud

Hell at home: Nakagami Kenji and the discovery of Arthur Rimbaud

Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan

This text surveys the accomplishments of Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo and other writers of the post-war generation, while looking further to examine the literary parameters of the post-Oe generation. It includes essays on Endo Shusaku, Hayashi Kyoko, Kanai Mieko, Kurahashi Yumiko, Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryu, Nakagami Kenji, Oe Kenzaburo, Ohba Minako, Shimada Masahiko, Takahashi Takako and Yoshimoto Banana.