Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity, and: Negotiating Identity: Nakagami Kenji’s Kiseki and the Power of the Tale (review)

The buraku issue has not received a great deal of attention from social scientists: over the last ten years, there have probably been fewer than five monographs on the topic. However, about the one well-known buraku origin author Nakagami Kenji there are now three book-length critical studies (two under review here), one book-length study that includes him in comparison with others, substantial reviews of the impact of his work by a further three authors in the major Japan studies journals, and at least two further doctoral theses. This is surprising given that only a small part of his work has appeared in English translation. Perhaps it really does indicate his importance in the Japanese literary canon of the late twentieth century and after.

For a political scientist, albeit one with some knowledge about matters buraku, to review these accounts and critiques of the works of Nakagami Kenji by specialists in comparative literature created precisely the parallax tension in this reviewer that lies at the core of Anne McKnight’s analysis in Nakagami, Japan. “Parallax” she explains, describes “a perspective according to which an object reviewed along two different lines of sight is seen through two different but simultaneous interpretations” (p. 2). For McKnight, the object is Nakagami’s writing and the two images are “mainstream or canonical Japanese literature” and “buraku literary arts.” For this reviewer the object is McKnight’s book and the two images (or approaches) are her accounts of Nakagami’s relations to buraku history and Japan’s “national literature” (kokubungaku). I am happier with the former than the latter.

For me, as for McKnight, Nakagami’s importance is that he is the first and so far the only canonical writer in modern Japanese literary history to self-identify as a burakumin. There have been rumors that others in “the canon” may have had buraku connections but none of these has been proven or accepted by the authors themselves. Indeed, one might go further to point out that he is one of a very small group of people in Japan successfully active in the public domain in any field who have “come out,” self-identified as burakumin. There are of course sometimes suggestions that actor A, pop singer B, or business woman C is concealing a buraku background but, although it is not uncommon for the zainichi Korean origins of people in the public sphere to be common knowledge—often also acknowledged by the person concerned—this is rare among passing burakumin. Nakagami not only explored aspects of his buraku identity in his fiction but also produced nonfiction work: fieldwork based–writing about the buraku history and communities in the region of Japan—Kumano on the Kii peninsula—where he was brought up.

McKnight structures her book around two “lines of sight.” Chapters 1 and 2 introduce and briefly analyze writing in Japan about buraku issues, both the small amount of historical writing on the topic that appeared before 1945 and some aspects of postwar fiction about buraku mondai, for example, the work of Hijikata Tetsu and Noma Hiroshi. Confession about buraku origin—as for example in Hakai, which is about buraku discrimination although not written by a burakumin—is a type of buraku fiction but as McKnight points out also a part of buraku everyday and not-so-everyday life. It was also a confession, this time of guilt (later retracted), that resulted in the conviction of Ishikawa Kazuo in 1963 for the murder of a schoolgirl in Saitama Prefecture and his subsequent serving over 30 years in prison—the Sayama Incident. In the lives of many burakumin, it is a confession (or exposure) that leads to what McKnight calls revelation of...