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· 233 · Conclusion Both/And I began Nakagami, Japan by showing how the notion of parallax was integral to Nakagami’s writing and how his doubled point of view attempted to run counter to the myth of Japan’s postwar world as a monocultural, homogenous society that prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s. Parallax provided a way to talk about the two viewing positions of buraku and mainstream that helped shape the contours of Nakagami’s biography as well as the two audiences who clustered around his work, readers of fine fiction and discursive readers familiar with an archive of buraku rhetorical activism. It also provided a way to account for stark differences in opinion between Nakagami and buraku activists regarding the role of culture and whether it called for a response at a semantic or structural level. Parallax was also useful to show a view of literature that is different than what we see through the monocular lens of kokubungaku nationalism in either its Meiji-era version or its postwar configuration. These kokubungaku examples I just listed are cases where two positions cannot accommodate the same view on the same object. But the metaphorical use of parallax in Nakagami’s work also proposes something else: the capacity to experience places—and texts—simultaneously and through scales of both, instead of inside/outside and either/or in the positions provided by a society outside of society or an imperial syntax. To read for buraku and roji, for South and modern provides a way to talk about how writing and power are exercised in similar ways in very different realms. This includes the important connection bridged by imperial syntax or literature and the legal system as we saw in the trope of confession that traverses the Sayama trial and literature from wildly different venues, from coterie magazines to mass leftist periodicals. If Nakagami’s novels, especially his late ones, never quite live up to the high hopes of solidarity that they seem to long for, they nonetheless push us to look beyond the 234 CONCLUSION postwar idea of a monoculture to explore some earlier eclipsed and plural histories of how parallax was experienced, critiqued, or made livable. My primary aim in this book has been to introduce a new lexicon for talking about differential identity as it is manifested in multiple scales of space-based identity that situate Japan in the context of global postmodernism and information society. The second goal has been to clarify how Nakagami’s periodization of modern literature along lines that privilege the Great Treason Incident, alongside its precedents and fallouts throughout the 1970s, would show an expanded notion of writing that includes extraliterary texts that share repertoires of rhetoric for depicting ethnicity, defining representation in both textual and political forms. I wanted to show how indebted modern literature was to ethnography and how certain patterns of writing persisted in writing the buraku over time. I also pursued how Nakagami’s socialized self, defined through exchange rather than self-consciousness, might produce a different idea of the literary producer. To do so I introduced the unconventional nature of his apprenticeship as an autodidact, a worker-writer, a traveler, and a volatile and compelling conversationalist. In roundtable conversations , mugging for the tape recorder showed exactly how Nakagami parlayed the assumption that “I is an ‘Other’” into communicative situations that he sometimes spurned, sometimes took charge of, sometimes got lost in, and sometimes treated as a space of self-mythology. I showed how the distribution of I-ness in his works happened less through controlled unilateral self-representation and more through writing himself into ongoing conversations and debates on the status of ethnicity, the relation of language in books to language outside of books, and the relation of Japanese fiction to ethnography, many of which highlighted the situation of living in parallax. I showed other examples of activism that clashed with Nakagami’s own agendas in chapters 1 and 2 in key figures like Noma Hiroshi and Hijikata Tetsu as well as in foundational historiographers. This divergence suggested not only that there was a sense of canonicity in buraku writing but that this canon was understood to privilege history, realism, and social engagement, and that although Nakagami’s works evaded the transformational self-consciousness that liberation literature writers advocated, he drew on a shared archive of buraku rhetorical activism, such as confession and the somatic pain caused by words, and applied its repertoire with historical particularity to contemporary events (the...

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