The Voice of a Transgressive Young Man

This chapter focuses on Nakagami's early writings and a short story titled “Rakudo” (1976). A number of prominent themes feature in his late 1960s writing. These include criticism of Japanese New Left writers, recollections of his “uneducated” half-brother's violence and suicide, and reflections on then nineteen-year-old Nagayama Norio, who shot and killed four people in 1968. First, through an analysis of nonfiction material produced by Nakagami from 1965 to 1969, the chapter profiles two elements that were frequently represented in literary production and discussed in academic writing during this period: the masses (taishū) and loss (sōshitsu). It also provides a detailed discussion on the intertextual relationship between Nakagami's late 1960s texts and the contemporaneous perspective of two Japanese critics. By referencing these scholars' texts, the chapter articulates Nakagami's motives for writing—giving representation to—hidden voices that express a sense of loss. Finally, the chapter focuses on Nakagami's short story “Rakudo.” Through reading this “autobiographical” yet fictional shōsetsu, it demonstrates how Nakagami represents the voices of a violent young husband and the silence of his battered wife.

The Paradox of Representation

This chapter sets out to clarify the paradox of representing the silenced subaltern voice. It appropriates an aspect of Gayatri Spivak's scholarship that creates possibilities for a new reading of Nakagami. Before arguing Spivak's view, the chapter presents background information about Kishū Kumano (Japan's marginalized South) by referring to Nakagami's essays, interviews, and travel journals. It examines Spivak's critique of ideology, hegemony, the subaltern, and her discussion on the role of the intellectual. Based on these ideas of the “intellectual,” the chapter investigates Nakagami's ambivalence about his role as a member of the silenced Burakumin community who is nevertheless privileged as a “person who has (written) language.” The challenges inherent in the act of representation are investigated by reading Marx's interpretation of this issue, in addition to the ideas of more contemporary theorists such as Spivak and Karatani. The chapter concludes with an analysis of an example of Nakagami's representation of the voices of mukoku Kumano Burakumin from the 1978 travel journal Kishū.

Introduction

This introductory chapter offers a brief background into the works of Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992) and how he represented the voices of the socially silenced in Japan. Notably, Nakagami belonged to the Burakumin (“outcaste”). Although he is known as a Burakumin writer, and much of his writing is indeed set in a Burakumin context, not all of his material provides representations of Burakumin life. His work further depicts the diversity of backgrounds among Buraku people, including those who, like the writer himself, received financial and economic benefits from the democratic systems introduced at the time. Given this Burakumin emphasis, the chapter briefly introduces key historical and sociopolitical aspects of that experience before embarking on an analysis of the writer's works. This analysis also includes a brief overview of the extensive corpus of Nakagami scholarship which exists in both Japanese and English.