The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature

Preface

Preface ix Years ago when I was a newlywed, my growing curiosity about the differences between my own American and my husband’s Japanese culture led me to take a Japanese classical dance course in Kabuki given by Ito Sachiyo to find out what the Japanese approach could teach me. What I discovered was that the Japanese and Western philosophies of dance movement and style were very different. In Western dance, the goal is to extend the body outward to an imaginary point furthest away with one’s fingers held loosely open. In Japanese classical dance, the dancers hold their bodies erect with their hands setting the boundaries of the inner space with their fingers firmly pressed together. It was this contrast between the tightly closed hands of the Japanese dancer, sealing the boundaries within, and the Western emphasis on extending the body outward to its farthest point, that I recalled when I began to study this theme. I first learned about the Japanese minority in Peru in a doctoral seminar on the Spanish-American novel and was surprised to discover that little had been written about the image of Peru’s sizeable Japanese minority as it was reflected in modern works of Peruvian literature and poetry. It was Mario Vargas Llosa’s compelling character Fushía, the epitome of the Japanese outsider in La casa verde, that led me to investigate this topic. Through the years, the challenging experience of raising two bicultural children in the US made me wonder how Peruvians perceive minority cultures like the Japanese, and how the Japanese, in turn, see themselves in Peru. While there are many sociological and historical books about the Japanese in Latin America, few literary studies examine the way the Japanese are represented by non-Japanese Peruvian writers as compared to Japanese Peruvian poets. This book focuses on images of the Japanese created by six nonJapanese Peruvian writers of modern Peruvian literature (novels and short stories) written between 1966 and 2006 that reflect­unspoken attitudes toward the Japanese minority. To highlight a critical dimension that is missing from this outsider perspective, I also included works by the two Nisei poets José Watanabe and Doris­Moromisato, whose sensitive portraits of their immigrant parents and intense revelations about their own search for identity and struggles to assimilate evoke a more nuanced depiction of the Japanese in Peru. In my references to Japanese authors in this book, I will x Preface follow the ­Japanese custom of using last names first. All references to my personal interviews with the authors under discussion are to the interviews transcribed in the Appendix in the back of this book. In preparation for the in-depth evaluations of individual works in the chapters that follow, Chapter 1 establishes the socio-historical context in Japan at the close of the nineteenth century when some of its inhabitants emigrated to Peru in pursuit of an economic dream. It goes on to investigate the reception they received in Peru where they initially found work as contract laborers in the coastal cotton and sugar plantations, guano fields, and, later, when they set up businesses and entered the professions in Peru’s major cities. The chapter follows the fate of the Japanese community during the pre–World War II and postwar eras and concludes with conditions in the contemporary period. Chapter 2 traces the evolution of the term Orient throughout history, examines the images of the Japanese/Oriental and Japan in Modernista prose and poetry and later in the works of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges. Chapter 3 begins the analysis of the individual works of modern Peruvian literature with one of the finest examples of a Japanese protagonist in Peruvian narrative, the character named Fushía, who is the ultimate outsider in Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece, La casa verde. It also examines a Japanese villain named Fukuda and a young female Japanese lawyer named Mitsuko in minor roles in the novelist’s more recent work Travesuras de la niña mala (2006) (The Bad Girl). In contrast to Fushía, Fukuda is a one-dimensional Japanese character whose monstrous treatment of Kuriko, the Japanese persona of the “bad girl,” has the effect of creating sympathy for this fickle Peruvian anti-heroine. Mitsuko represents the most modern of the Japanese female characters in the selected Peruvian narrative. A skilled, ambitious lawyer, she discovers that her plan to avoid all relationships that involve emotional attachments in order to pursue a life of...