Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction (review)

Nakagami Kenji is a touchstone for powerful, physical writing, violent mythologies, and political action. As a literary persona and historical figure, who arguably entered the realm of the mythical himself after his death in 1992, Nakagami is almost too much for any one book to contain. He remains one of the most compelling figures in modern Japanese literary history.

The Japanese criticism of Nakagami that coalesced after his death served to canonize his Akiyuki series (Misaki, Karekinada, and Chi no hate shijōno toki). Critics such as Karatani Kōjin, who were also personal friends of Nakagami, theorized the role of narrative and traditional tales (monogatari) in Nakagami’s battles with the codes of Japanese literature and history. In their focus on his more strictly literary works, these critics reinforced (perhaps inadvertently) the traditional shishōsetsu (I-novel) link between author and subject, between Nakagami and Akiyuki as products of the buraku (outcaste neighborhood). Within English-language scholarship, critics have looked at the canon and beyond, to his poetry, short stories, and nonfictional works such as Kishū: ki no kuni ne no kuni monogatari. Their approaches have ranged from the feminist to the anthropological to the socially conscious. This work has yielded an examination of issues such as the violence in Nakagami’s fiction, especially that directed at women; the influence of structuralist-and poststructuralist-inspired fieldwork on his nonfiction; and the relationship between Nakagami and the buraku liberation struggles that coincided with his career. Critics are divided over this last point, some taking Nakagami to task for his lack of social realism and failure to break down prejudice and others arguing strenuously for maintaining a distinction between Nakagami’s writing, his narrative topos, and the real buraku. Nakagami’s own stance on this issue was ambiguous; he struggled to give voice to the buraku alleyways but bristled at the censorship of the Buraku Liberation League.

Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction is a welcome addition to this critical oeuvre. Eve Zimmerman takes a self-termed “ethnographic” approach to the study of the author, combining textual and biographical readings of the canonical and noncanonical in Nakagami’s fiction, nonfiction, and criticism from the 1970s and 1980s. She argues that we read Nakagami for his representation of the underside of the postwar economic recovery, for his engagement with the world and world literature, for his shaping of the literary world of 1970s and 1980s Japan, for his transformation of modern Japanese literature, for his buraku origins and the complexity he brings to the issue of minority identity, but perhaps most importantly because we “cannot go around him” (p. 2).

In positioning herself amidst the debates over Nakagami’s work, Zimmerman carefully treads the line between author and subject. In arguing that the physical, actual buraku and the “imaginary topos” are “mutually determining elements of an equation that lies at the heart of Nakagami’s creative process,” she consciously weaves together these divergent strands of Nakagami criticism, because to privilege one would risk losing Nakagami’s own story (p. 9). Rather than question the authenticity of Nakagami’s work via the vectors of buraku writing or “literature,” Zimmerman takes a triangular approach, looking at the connections between text, author, and outside world. Her suggestion that we pay attention to the cacophony of voices that spills out from his fictional buraku alleyways (roji) is reflected in her ethnographic approach. Out of the Alleyway combines close readings and literary analysis with Zimmerman’s own fieldwork: her visits to Kumano and personal interviews with Nakagami, his family, neighbors, and fellow burakumin.

At its most compelling, Out of the Alleyway shows Nakagami to be a writer who was constantly recreating himself and willing himself into being through his words. In her own highly readable, powerful prose, Zimmerman teaches us something about the value and productivity of reading with an eye to the author...