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  • Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction
  • Michael K. Bourdaghs
Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction. By Eve Zimmerman. Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. 275 pages. Hardcover $39.95/£25.95/€28.00.

The ending of a narrative often assumes the guise of fate. This is because the closing pages of any story seem to lock into place the meaning of everything that preceded them. Historical narratives of modern Japanese literature written in the 1970s and 1980s tended to close with Mishima Yukio, making it seem as if he were the inevitable conclusion toward which all earlier writers had pointed. In the last decade or so, however, works of criticism from both inside and outside Japan have proposed a new terminus: novelist Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992). [End Page 442]

The new endpoint changes everything that precedes it; what was peripheral in earlier versions now stands at center stage. Nakagami’s life and writings make him seem a natural fit for the role of final synthesis to all the antitheses that drove the dialectical narrative of modern Japanese literary history: monogatari versus shōsetsu, classical versus modern, poetry versus prose, politics versus art, myth versus history, fiction versus autobiography, naturalism versus romanticism. His assumption to the throne that sits at “the end of literature” comes to seem all but foreordained, like King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. “We read Nakagami,” Eve Zimmerman writes in this fine new study, “because we cannot go around him” (p. 2).

This seeming naturalness is, of course, one of the crafty artifices of historical narrative. Moreover, as Zimmerman demonstrates, no one was more aware than Nakagami himself of the power of narrative to perform political alchemy, to transform base contingency into golden necessity. His entire career might be summed up as an experiment in trying to free up a measure of slack by wriggling against the constraints of narrative and the mechanisms by which it produces authoritative meaning.

In part, as Zimmerman argues, this was a task Nakagami was born to as a member of Japan’s buraku outcaste community. Out of the Alleyway, the first English-language monograph on the author, begins appropriately with the author’s life story—as much an intellectual and spiritual journey as a personal biography, and one that inevitably intersects with broad historical forces. Raised in poverty in the buraku “alleyway” in Shingū, Wakayama prefecture, Nakagami moved to Tokyo in his late teens. While he always maintained an ambiguous but imperishable bond to his roots on the periphery, it was nonetheless in the metropolitan center that he made his mark, first winning acclaim as a rising young novelist in the 1970s. Given his background, many critics eventually identified Nakagami as a “minority writer,” a category that he labored to undermine even as he also accepted it. Zimmerman argues that we need to understand Nakagami in terms of a triangle, with the author sitting at one angle, his writings at another, and historical reality at the third. None of the angles can substitute for any of the others, nor can any be understood in the absence of the other two. It is a productive approach that allows us to begin to grasp Nakagami’s importance without stripping away the enormous complexity of his legacy. It also allows Zimmerman to retain the larger-than-life image that Nakagami has acquired even as she delves carefully into the details of his intricate texts.

The body of Out of the Alleyway consists of chapters, each centered on a different set of texts, that take up different aspects of Nakagami’s writings. Zimmerman begins with his early poetry, often neglected by previous critics. Focusing on the figure of the beautiful, expendable male, Zimmerman traces Nakagami’s youthful encounter with French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud and the impact this had on his own poetry and prose. She then turns to the trilogy of novels that solidified Nakagami’s status as a writer: Misaki (The Cape, available in English translation by Zimmerman and the winner of a 1975 Akutagawa Prize), Karekinada (Withered Tree Straits, 1977), and Chi no hate shijō no toki...

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