The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto (review)

The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto by Kenji Nakagami. Translated by Eve Zimmerman. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1999. 192 pages, paper $12.95.

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.

"The Cape" centers around a family much like Nakagami's own. The protagonist, twenty-four-year-old Akiyuki, is the illegitimate son of a generally despised drifter known only as "that man." Akiyuki lives with his mother, stepfather, and stepbrother, and near his half-sister, Mie, a child from his mother's first marriage. (Translator Eve Zimmerman kindly charts the complicated family relations at the beginning of the book.) Akiyuki is tortured by images of an older brother who was violent and who committed suicide twelve years before, of his estranged biological father, and of a half-sister whom he's never met and who may be a prostitute at a nearby bar. While struggling to find his place in this patchwork family, Akiyuki vows to rise above the violence and squalor of his surroundings. He starts each day with exercise, keeps few possessions, avoids sex and alcohol, and seeks fulfillment and purification in hard physical labor.

Akiyuki blames their troubles on place (burakumin were required to live in buraku, designated neighborhoods): "You could probably find enough reasons for each fire or murder, if you looked carefully enough, but the real reason was the land itself, hemmed in by mountains and rivers and sea and steaming in the sun. People went crazy fast."

Because "The Cape" was written in clear, simple prose, many critics considered it to be the intuitive work of an uneducated blue-collar worker. However, the sophistication of "House on Fire," a story that predates "The Cape," shows that Nakagami was in control of his narrative and knew what he was doing. Many of the characters and events in this story are revisited in "The Cape." The son, here an adult with a wife and children, has just learned from his mother that his arsonist-gambler father is dying from injuries incurred in a motorcycle accident. The son ponders his relationship to, and the influence of, the man he never really knew and reconstructs the role that this man played in the life of his family. The narrative jumps from present to imagined past and back again, alternating between points of view.

"Red Hair" is a fairly straightforward account of the sexual relations of a day laborer and the mysterious, insatiable red-haired woman he picks up at a bus stop. Although one Japanese critic called this story a depiction of "the harmonious feeling human beings get when they experience themselves as a part of nature," dark currents run through the text. There are hints that the woman, who has abandoned her teacher-husband and children, is emotionally damaged. Each morning the couple is awakened by the screams of the speed addict next door. With its occasional images of violence and spare plot, this story illustrates another aspect of Nakagami's work.

Western readers have long consumed exotic images of geisha and samurai; more recently, they've encountered the American-influenced works of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto. The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto adds depth to our understanding of Japan and its people.

In her preface...