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93 3 Nippo-Peruvian Self-Identification in Augusto Higa’s La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu and Japón no da dos oportunidades chapter 3 analyzes two works by Augusto Higa Oshiro, a Peruvian Nikkei author born in Lima in 1946. After graduating from the University of San Marcos with a bachelor’s degree in Peruvian and Latin American literature, he worked as editor of the Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (National Institute of Research and Development; INIDE). Higa currently teaches literature in several universities, including the Universidad Nacional Federico Villarreal, and gives creative writing workshops. Besides the works analyzed here, he has published two short story collections, Que te coma el tigre (May the Tiger Eat You, 1977) and La casa de Albaceleste (Albaceleste’s House, 1986), and a novel, Final del porvenir (End of the Future, 1992).1 This chapter explores literary madness as a vehicle for cultural self-revelation. It also analyzes the identitarian self-definition and the identity transformations of a Japanese Peruvian through the use of kenshō in Higa’s novel La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu 94 nikkei narratives (Katzuo Nakamatsu’s Enlightenment, 2008) and from the perspective of Higa’s real-life experiences in Japan, as recounted in his testimonial Japón no da dos oportunidades. By contrasting these two works, I highlight the continuities and changes across Higa’s opus. More importantly, they are two of the best articulations of the processes of de-ethnification and re-ethnification (by their recurrence in this literary corpus, they seem to be key components of the Nikkei condition) that can be found in Peruvian Nikkei cultural production. Although the testimonial was published fourteen years before the novel, I shall begin with the analysis of the latter, which is, in my view, Higa’s crowning literary achievement. In an interview with Maribel de Paz, the author admits that Nakamatsu is his alter ego, a character who struggles with his own marginality and loneliness , just as Higa himself has done throughout his life. Yet he sees his protagonist as the typical loser, in contrast with the relentless fighters Nakamatsu admires, such as, for example, his father’s friend, Etsuko Untén, and the Peruvian avant-garde poet Martín Adán (1908–1985).2 Higa also considers this novel “a rematch”3 with himself, as it helped him, through the Nisei perspective, to find his self. Regardless of the author’s comments, however, the connection between La iluminación and the author’s disappointing dekasegi experience (as well as the testimonial he wrote to denounce the abuses suffered by Latin American dekasegi in Japan) seems to be self-evident. Katzuo Nakamatsu, the protagonist of La iluminación, is a selfdestructive and suicidal Nisei college professor and a frustrated writer who progressively loses his mind after being dismissed from his job as a literature professor for being too old. His inability to identify with the Peruvian reality surrounding him has also increased his existential angst and has contributed to his loss of reality. From the beginning, we learn about the liminality of his life through the narrator’s commentaries: “As he was the son of Japanese parents, a Nisei, almost a foreigner, and all those places, their people, were alien to him, and they only constituted his proximity, the neutral zone where he deposited his gaze, and he was banned from going in, being like them, having legs, having eyes, having arms.”4 The next 127 pages encompass the protagonist’s psychological decline, Augusto Higa 95 his descent into madness, and his preoccupation with how he will die. He borrows a friend’s gun, but never has the courage to use it. He chooses, instead, a slower means of self-destruction: wandering the most dangerous and sordid streets of Lima. This type of behavior shows points of connection with other examples of literary madness . As Lillian Feder argues in her Madness in Literature (1980): “The mad protagonist generally inhabits the familiar world of civilized people, although in his madness he may retreat to the savage environment and condition of the traditional wild man. Furthermore , although his aberrant thoughts and behavior may determine his essential role, as savagery does the wild man’s, madness is still but one aspect of his nature, and it may emerge only in extreme or extraordinary circumstances” (4). In the novel, Nakamatsu’s wandering through unsafe neighborhoods in a state of deep anguish is the equivalent of this walking alone into the...

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