Imagining the Unnegotiable Home at the Margins in La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro

One of the most recurrent questions posed in recent interviews to Augusto Higa Oshiro (1946-), the author of La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu (2008), is the matter of Japanese Peruvian Niseis’ identity (Carranza).¹ In an interview conducted by the Asociación Peruano Japonesa, Higa defines the Nisei identity as one aspect of a Peruvian national identity: “El nisei no es mitad japonés y mitad peruano. No, el nisei es una forma de ser peruano, pero sin renegar de nuestras raíces japonesas. Eso es todo” (“El nisei”). He then reveals that this definition of Nisei identity is closely related to the discovery of his own self as Nisei while he was working in Japan:²

Si tú te preguntas qué cosas tienen de japonés [los descendientes de japoneses], ¿qué vas a decir? Nada, porque finalmente lo japonés es una abstracción. Por eso a mí el viaje a Japón me sirvió de mucho. Cuando llegué a Japón me encontré con una inmensidad de posibilidades, inimaginables. La personalidad nisei, tal cual la vemos acá, no existe en Japón.

[…].

Allí me di cuenta de que soy más peruano y más latinoamericano de lo que hubiera imaginado.

(“El nisei”)

In a more recent interview conducted by Francisco Ángeles, Higa, reinforcing what he has already expressed about his identity as more Peruvian than Japanese, explicitly asserts that the concept of Nisei is something invented and constructed within Peruvian society: “me di cuenta […] que el nisei […] es un invento, una creación peruana que […] es inexistente en Japón. Por lo tanto mis vínculos con la cultura japonesa se disminuyeron completamente.”

Higa seems to suggest that the nationally constructed identity of Peruvian Nisei weakens Japaneseness and he therefore rejects the dual identity of half Peruvian and half Japanese as indicated in his words above, “no es mitad japonés y mitad peruano” (“El nisei”). He adds that as a Nisei, “nuestro mejor destino es peruano” (Ángeles). If a Nisei should find his or her identity to be Peruvian, what happens to the Japanese cultural identity that Higa himself asserts should not be disowned? Is it possible for a Peruvian Nisei to claim without contradictions that he or she is part of a Peruvian national identity, while acknowledging his or her Japanese ancestral roots? This question, further, leads one to inquire what it means for a Nisei to declare a settled identity as “more Peruvian than Japanese,” rejecting the half and half identity.

Higa’s most recent novel, La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu (2008), in which the author depicts the psyche of a Nisei protagonist, Katzuo Nakamatsu, serves as a literary space for interrogating these questions of Nisei identity. The novel tells a story about Nakamatsu, a literature professor of Japanese ancestry in his late 50s, who has not been able to find a sense of belonging either in his native country, Peru, or the Japanese Peruvian community in Lima, the city where he resides. Nakamatsu’s psychological struggles caused by his uncertain identity and the lack of a sense of belonging are narrated by a third-person who inserts his own personal voice in the middle of the novel, revealing that he is a colleague-friend of Nakamatsu and that he is writing a report, which is this novel, based on the protagonist’s two projects left to him – a critical work on Martín Adán, a well-known twentieth-century Peruvian Avant-garde poet³ and a biographical chronicle work on Japanese immigrant families in Peru. The narrator takes the reader into the abyss of Nakamatsu’s latent consciousness of being unable to fully belong to the mainstream society of Lima, while also feeling out of place in the Japanese Peruvian community. Not belonging to either place, Nakamatsu seems to have created his own space of comfort and safety in his apartment as well as in the routes of his routine walks. He spends most of the time alone in these places, either working on his research...