Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity
Anne McKnight
Abstract
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. This book 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 lit ... More
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. This book 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. The book 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 the text considers the ways in which Nakagami and other twentieth-century writers used ethnography to shape Japanese literature, it reveals how ideas about language also imagined a transfigured relation to mainstream culture and politics. This 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.
Keywords:
Nakagami Kenji,
buraku-min,
buraku writing,
postwar Japan,
modern Japanese literature,
ethnography
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816672851 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816672851.001.0001 |
