Kenji Nakagami - The ghetto life of Japan's outcaste class (burakumin). In shocking contrast to the West's perception of a controlled and Zen-like Japan, young buraku workers struggle with incest, rape, murder, and suicide. Women use sex to control and escape, their many children fathered by a variety of men

Kenji Nakagami, The Cape: and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto, Trans. by Eve Zimmerman, Stone Bridge Press, 2008.

„Nakagami's startling, vigorous writing depicts the ghetto life of Japan's outcaste class (burakumin) he knew intimately. In shocking contrast to the West's perception of a controlled and Zen-like Japan, young buraku workers struggle with incest, rape, murder, and suicide. Women use sex to control and escape, their many children fathered by a variety of men. In a network of alleys and ditches, these villagers are bound by complex blood ties that are both comforting and oppressive.“

„The fiction of Kenji Nakagami has no peer in contemporary Japan. Born into the burakumin--an outcast class shunned in feudal Japan and still suffering discrimination today--Nakagami depicts the lives of his people in powerful, sensual prose and stark, sometimes horrifying detail. "The Cape" is his breakthough novella about a burakumin community in a small coastal city and their struggles with complicated family histories and troubled memories. Poverty, violence, suicide, and the harsh natural conditions of the home constantly disrupt their lives. Two more early stories, "House on Fire" and "Red Hair, " continue these themes, relieved by small moments of profound tenderness.“

„Forget everything you thought you knew about Japanese literature; in The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto, Kenji Nakagami shows a face of Japan that's unlike any the West has seen before. A member of the burakumin minority--often called Japan's untouchables--the author used disjointed, rough-hewn prose to describe a gritty, down-and-out world. Both "The Cape" and "House on Fire" explore the tangled family ties of Akiyuki, a construction worker who lives among the crowded roji or alleyways of the Kishu province. Marked by madness, incest, and violence, the place makes Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County look like Mr. Rogers's neighborhood. In the course of "The Cape," for instance, Akiyuki's sister loses her mind, an in-law dies after being stabbed in his "good leg," and Akiyuki himself sleeps with a whore he strongly suspects is his half-sister. In spite of this troubled legacy, this man is the very opposite of introspective. With his longing for purity and his tireless appetite for physical labor, he's a kind of blank canvas against which his complicated family romance plays out:

The tree reminded him of himself. Akiyuki didn't know what kind of tree it was, and he didn't care. The tree had no flowers or fruit. It spread its branches to the sun, it trembled in the wind. That's enough, he thought. The tree doesn't need flowers or fruit. It doesn't need a name.

Unfortunately, the third story here ("Red Hair") is a disappointment--the kind of cheerless, one-note erotica that makes sex look like a torture devised by Existentialist philosophers. No matter; grand, tragic, and structurally complex, "The Cape" and "House on Fire" contain enough Freudian drama between them to keep a pair of Faulkner scholars obsessed for weeks. Skillfully translated by Eve Zimmerman (who also provides a preface, afterword, and helpful family tree), this is fiction of explosive power and formal daring. - Mary Park

 „Western readers often assume that Japan is one homogeneous culture, but Nakagami, award-winning burakumin writer, exposes the fissures behind this facade. Burakumin are outcast Japanese, marginalized and degraded by a centuries-old belief that they are mysteriously "tainted" with impure blood. Nakagami, who died in 1992 at the age of 46, was the first to achieve literary success while documenting this oppressive legacy. The title novella, "The Cape," introduces Akiyuki, like Nakagami himself an illegitimate son. The story, set in the Kishu region of Japan, centers around one extended and discordant family. A ceremony is held to honor Akiyuki's mother's first legal husband, while Akiyuki's biological father, "that man," is reputed to recklessly haunt the red light district's prostitutes. A man on Akiyuki's construction crew, Yasuo, has killed another worker on the crew, Furuichi, and the community turns on itself, in grief and blame. Akiyuki's conflicted feelings about his father merge with a desire for self-obliteration, and he seeks and beds the prostitute he believes is his father's daughter, his own half-sister. In "House on Fire," we continue with Akiyuki's story, and learn more about his father, Yasu, a violent pyromaniac. Akiyuki, in a new city and married, descends into alcoholic violence, beating his wife viciously after learning that Yasu has been fatally injured in a motorcycle accident. In these stories, Nakagami is unrelentingly grim, showing a Zola-like obsession with inherited traits. In the final entry, "Red Hair," Nakagami gives rein to his erotic side, depicting the frenzied and strange coupling of Kozo, a construction worker, and a mysterious red-haired hitchhiker. Nakagami's tough, ruthless prose is often abstruse, with a taut psychological subtext, while elsewhere the clarity is unassailable: his detailing of the desperate passions in a Japanese ghetto rupture American stereotypes of the peaceful, impassive "nature" of the Japanese.  The Cape won the Akutagawa Prize in 1976.“ – Publishers Weekly

"In "The Cape" Nakagami excels at drawing the reader into what quickly becomes a nightmarish reality and oppressive existence for the protagonist Akiyuki, a young man who only wants to live a simple life, and yet is unable to escape the chains and fetters of his bloodline. He is defined, and defines himself, by his relation to others--his mother, his siblings, but most of all, his father. In the climax of the story, in his desperation to fight against his father's influence in his life, Akiyuki becomes most like his father--drunk, wild, and in bed with a prostitute (who very likely is his father's daughter, Akiyuki's own half-sister!). The more Akiyuki fights his destiny, the closer he comes to fulfilling it.
Unfortunately, "House on Fire" explores similar themes but without quite the same impact as "The Cape". Where "The Cape" was incredibly focused, with the plot and characters masterfully detailed, "House on Fire" tries (perhaps a little over-ambitiously) to tell the dual stories of Akiyuki's father, Yasu, and Akiyuki's later life family problems. Like "The Cape", this story is told in the third person, but the events surrounding his father are viewed from the perspective of Akiyuki's older brother (a boy of 11 or 12 at the time) whereas Akiyuki is the subject and object of the later events. The shifts in time and perspective make this very short story disjointed and difficult for the reader to become fully engaged in, unlike "The Cape". Although the "like father, like son" themes are the same, Akiyuki's personality has dramatically shifted from a well-meaning youth to a chillingly violent man, his transformation into his hated father complete. The reader is left with little sympathy for the "arsonist" father and son who destroy fragile houses made not only of wood, but of family ties.
"Red Hair" is an unrelated story that tells of the sexual liaison between the blue-collar Kozo and a red-haired hitch-hiker. The story lacks the fire of a young Oe or Murakami Ryu, the twisted passion of Tanizaki or Mishima, or even the cool detachment of a Murakami Haruki and is instead essentially just a well-written, but ultimately forgettable piece of erotica. This collection of stories might have been better served had another of Nakagami's pieces been chosen, as this one is a step below the first two stories.
Although "Red Hair" is a disappointment and "House on Fire" pales in comparison to "The Cape", the title story alone makes picking up this book worthwhile. Very well-written with an eye to detail, "The Cape" is clearly a direct product of Nakagami's guts and soul. Akiyuki's futile yet valiant struggle against his genes makes for a memorable work, one that personifies a gifted writer who maintains a unique place in Japanese post-war literature.“ – Charles E. Stevens

"THE LATE JAPANESE writer Kenji Nakagami was barakumin--a Japanese outcaste. It was in this context that he came to prominence in the 1970s with stories that frankly depicted life among the barakumin.

The Cape's three stories, which were first published in Japan in the '70s, don't focus much on exactly what forms social oppression took. Instead, Nakagami's writing addresses the presumed effects of the outcaste life (alcoholism, rape, murder, suicide), as he tells the stories of construction workers and prostitutes in a small coastal town.

So the oppression of Nakagami's people has to be taken on faith, to some extent. (Not difficult, this, as oppression tends to be a depressingly universal phenomenon.) More of a concern, though, is the fact that much of The Cape is seen through a dull haze of tragedy and disappointment, which ultimately proves more wearying than interesting. In the middle of the first story, "The Cape," a man stabs and kills his brother-in-law, and while the act sets off various breakdowns in his extended family, very little thought is given to exactly why the stabbing occurred in the first place. The question simply isn't asked.

The second story, "House on Fire," deals with the sniping relations in the same extended family at a different point in time. "Red Hair," the third story, nearly redeems the book, even if its inclusion is jarring enough to seem almost accidental. In this piece, which ostensibly takes place in the same town, a construction worker picks up a female hitchhiker, and the two embark on a dizzyingly effortless, almost obsessive affair, in which the two dine and talk and screw till they're sore. And unlike the rest of The Cape, the 20-odd pages of "Red Hair" hum with a raw abandon and hard, sharp words that sometimes land like slaps. In the gleeful oblivion of this language, there's a hope--perhaps foolish--for a few glimpses of true happiness. But it's a hope that casts the rest of the book in stark contrast, illuminating the town around the lovers' heated bodies, and the chapters around their smoldering words.“ – Francis Hwang

"I write for a public that cannot read me. My mother, my sister, my brothers are illiterate like all the Burakumin." Kenji Nakagami was born in 1946 in the ghetto of Shingu, one of the Burakus who form the pariahs of Japanese society. The subject is taboo in Japan. Nakagami is one of the few to tackle it openly.

An enfant terrible of Japanese letters, he defines himself as a "child of shame". Jazz buff, militant of the extreme left, baggage handler at Tokyo Airport, he presents an image unclassifiable as that of a writer - the more disturbing the more he proclaims his status as a pariah. All his books evoke the life of a Burakumin, both those he has already published and those he has planned. "A Thousand Years of Pleasure", a collection of short stories, has already been translated into French. "Misaki" (The Cape), the first volume in a cycle of novels which won him the Akutagawa Prize in 1975, has not yet been translated. Curiously, it is the second volume, "The Sea of Dead Trees", which is now coming out. It is a family chronicle of the life of the Burakumin. Out of a family history extraordinarily complicated by remarriages and adoptions emerges the character of Akiyuki. He is a labourer in a small firm. He lives with his mother, stepfather and numerous stepbrothers. He is constantly haunted by the image of the Other, his real father who simultaneously had three children by three different mothers. Akiyuki finds himself endowed with brothers and sisters he does not know. In an atmosphere of Greek tragedy, soaked with ancestral hatreds and gossip, it ends in violation of all prohibitions, murder and incest.

LIBERATION: The existence of the Burakumin is practically never touched on in Japan. Nevertheless, are you forced to be the only one to proclaim yourself as such?

NAKAGAMI: Among writers I am the only one to say it. In Japan, there is a tendency never to say things openly. One always dilutes truths with floods of politeness. When one offers a gift, one says "take this horrible thing." When one speaks of one's family, one says "my idiot of a son." I am a Burakumin, I am like a child of shame. There have been other writers in my position, but they never avowed their origins. Kawabata, for example, or Mishima.

LIBERATION: How did you become a writer, in these conditions?

NAKAGAMI: I became a writer when I learned of my different condition, on leaving my ghetto. I could learn to read and write after the war, because at that time the Americans had instituted compulsory education for all in Japan. My mother forbade me to read, saying it would drive me mad. When I recall this education, it was almost a luxury for a writer. Japanese literature, in its origins, was narrative and founded on oral tradition. The No, the Kabuki came from there, that tradition in which I was bathed.

LIBERATION: Did your condition pose problems of integration into literary milieux?

NAKAGAMI: The literary milieux try hard to comprehend the problem of the Burakumin. The difficulties I met were more of a personal kind. When someone presents me to the outside world as a writer representative of Japan, it's difficult to take that on. Japan wants to show foreigners beautiful things like the No and the Kabuki while forgetting that all that comes from the Buraku. Japan has appropriated them without making their origins clear, just like the tradition of the Ainus or that of Okinawa. I sometimes have a feeling of being used.

LIBERATION: Hasn't the situation evolved since the war?

NAKAGAMI: The discrimination is just as strong, notably at the times of marriage and getting a job. An example: in the great Japanese combines there is not one Burakumin, because directories exist that list the names of all the Buraku in Japan, and these permit their elimination. The existence of these directories was not revealed until twelve years ago. After the scandal it was decided to stop the practice. But only three months ago it was discovered that these Buraku directories had been computerized.

LIBERATION: A Japanese critic, Yomota Inuhiko, while remarking that your literary debut coincided with the suicide of Mishima, wrote that your work seemed "to develop in its own way a problematic inherited directly from Mishima".

NAKAGAMI: I don't feel influenced by Mishima, though I have a feeling of intimacy with him and I very much like his writings. I am aware of his Buraku origins (through his great-grandfather). As writers, there is nothing in common between us beyond a certain interest in the emperor. He felt admiration for him, I a numb fear. I am the mirror image of Mishima, as on a playing card.

LIBERATION: Are there any writers who have influenced you?

NAKAGAMI: Faulkner, Genet and Celine were shocks to me. Faulkner and Genet above all were revolutionary writers. Genet introduced marginality into literature and Faulkner introduced the Third World, the South. Among Japanese writers, my model is Tanizaki. But I'm not worried. If I reach his age, I hope to reach his level and pass it. It's true that he died very old; that leaves me a bit of a margin.“ – Interview by Gerard Meudal

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Anne McKnight, Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity, U Of Minnesota Press, 2011.

„How do you write yourself into a literature that doesn’t know you exist? This was the conundrum confronted by Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992), who counted himself among the buraku-min, Japan’s largest minority. His answer brought the histories and rhetorical traditions of buraku writing into the high culture of Japanese literature for the first time and helped establish him as the most canonical writer born in postwar Japan.
In Nakagami, Japan, Anne McKnight shows how the writer’s exploration of buraku led to a unique blend of fiction and ethnography—which amounted to nothing less than a reimagining of modern Japanese literature. McKnight develops a parallax view of Nakagami’s achievement, allowing us to see him much as he saw himself, as a writer whose accomplishments traversed both buraku literary arts and high literary culture in Japan.
As she considers the ways in which Nakagami and other twentieth-century writers used ethnography to shape Japanese literature, McKnight reveals how ideas about language also imagined a transfigured relation to mainstream culture and politics. Her analysis of the resulting “rhetorical activism” lays bare Nakagami’s unique blending of literature and ethnography within the context of twentieth-century ideas about race, ethnicity, and citizenship—in Japan, but also on an international scale.“

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