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Nakagami, Japan

Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity

2011
•
Author:

Anne McKnight

Nakagami, Japan

How Japan’s most canonical postwar writer brought that country’s largest social minority into the mainstream

Anne McKnight shows how Nakagami Kenji’s exploration of buraku writing led to a unique blend of fiction and ethnography—and a reimagining of modern Japanese literature. McKnight develops a parallax view of Nakagami’s achievement, allowing us to see the writer much as he saw himself, as a writer whose accomplishments traversed both buraku literary arts and high literary culture in Japan.

Anne McKnight’s proposal that we understand Nakagami’s writings in terms of a ‘parallax vision’ immediately resonates in the mind of anyone familiar with his works: it is an approach that finally allows Nakagami to be Nakagami. We know that we need to get outside the framework of national literary studies, but that is a task easier said than done. McKnight goes a good deal of the way toward showing us what is to be done now in the study of both Japanese literature and minority cultures.

—

Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago

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.

Nakagami, Japan

Anne McKnight is assistant professor of East Asian languages and cultures and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.

Nakagami, Japan

Anne McKnight’s proposal that we understand Nakagami’s writings in terms of a ‘parallax vision’ immediately resonates in the mind of anyone familiar with his works: it is an approach that finally allows Nakagami to be Nakagami. We know that we need to get outside the framework of national literary studies, but that is a task easier said than done. McKnight goes a good deal of the way toward showing us what is to be done now in the study of both Japanese literature and minority cultures.

—

Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago

Nakagami, Japan

Acknowledgments
Introduction: I Is an Other
1. An Archive of Activism
2. Confession and the Crisis of Buraku Writing in the 1970s
3. Constituents of National Literature
4. Inaudible Man
5. The 38th Parallax: Nakagami in/and Korea
6. Subculture and the South
Conclusion
Notes
Index