THE CAPE AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE JAPANESE GHETTO
By KENJI NAKAGAMI
Translated by Eve Zimmerman. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1999. 191 pages, $12.95 (paperback)

SNAKELUST
By KENJI NAKAGAMI
Translated by Andrew Rankin. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1998. 147 pages, yen 3,000 (hardcover)

Kenneth Richard

Kenji Nakagami (1946-92) died an untimely death of complications from kidney cancer at the peak of his writing career. In his time, Nakagami was a darling of intellectual left-leaning critics, and they continue to keep his name in the public eye. The title story from The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto is the first translation into English of a work that won Japan's prestigious Akutagawa award for literature in 1975 and catapulted Nakagami into the front line of Japanese writers. Like Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, Nakagami speaks in the voices of burkumin, or village dwellers, to use a Japanese phrase for outcasts. Nakagami himself is from this class. Traditionally, such outcasts performed such work as butchering animals, tanning hides, and making leather goods, which the core society demanded, yet which Buddhism proscribed as unclean occupations.
"The Cape" shares mythic qualities with the earliest of Japanese historical records, in which two deities, brother and sister, copulate and create the islands of Japan. Akiyuki, the main male character (read Nakagami), struggles to come to terms with his fractured family, his ruptured life. His older brother committed suicide, and his father, who deserted his mother for other women, killed himself by driving his motorcycle into a tree. Orphaned within his own family, Akiyuki carries within him the seeds of his transcendence. He is without artifice. He sees nature as the purest form, and he aspires to it:

Next to the railroad crossing, where the alleyway curved off to the left, a single tree was gently shaking its leaves. 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.

Later in "The Cape," his half-sister Mie succumbs to an attack of pleurisy and madness during Buddhist ceremonies to honor the memory of Akiyuki's dead father. Mie is one of the few characters in the story who actually have a name. The nameless survive, and the named are doomed.
Akiyuki's search culminates, at the end of the story, in his sleeping with a prostitute whom he knows is another of his father's illegitimate children.

I'm violating the child of that man, he thought. I'm trying to degrade the man himself. No, I'm trying to degrade all who share blood, my mother, my sister, and my brother, too. Degrade everything."

As in the Japanese creation myth, Akiyuki (Nakagami) and his sister will procreate a new world.
"The Cape" is touching and devastatingly true to Nakagami's original blend of bloodlust, violence, and animism. It is also an exercise in deconstruction. The other stories in this volume are "House on Fire" (1975) and "Red Hair" (1978).
"House on Fire" (1975) takes the reader back to events in the life of Nakagami's family before those in "The Cape," a litany of arson, treachery, wife beating, and the death of Nakagami's father. A motorcycle impaling its rider, Nakagami's father, on a tree branch is the symbol Nakagami uses over and over to indicate the purity and guilelessness of nature in contrast to the inferiority of his blood line.

Nakagami is a master of the erotic, as well as of the perverse and the violent. "Red Hair," the third story in the collection, is simply the hottest, sexiest heterosexual encounter in modern Japanese literature, without exception. The whole piece, twenty-five pages, is a concentrated evening of nonstop sex between the male narrator and a woman who has unnaturally dyed hair, as dull and contrived as she. The straightforward, third-person narration, with a counterpoint of a speed-addicted woman in an adjoining apartment lending her cries to those of the woman, fully explores nudity and genital description of a type that had not been permitted in Japanese fiction before the 1970s.
Those readers who yearn for a socially relevant tale from Japan without the cherry blossoms and subtle gestures of a hot-spring geisha will like Nakagami's realism. However, Zimmerman's translation is, at times, so fractured as to be unkind to the original.
Rankin's translations of the seven moral fables in Snakelust utterly transform Nakagami from a fractured realist into a smooth, polished teller of traditional tales complete with ghosts and demons. "The Mountain Ascetic" (1974), "The Wind and the Light" (1975), "Crimson Waterfall" (1977), "The Tale of a Demon" (1981), and "Gravity" (1981) employ elements of the surreal, the Buddhist fable, and even the Greek myth of Oedipus.
The title story, "Snakelust" (1975), however, takes us back to the raw-edged world of the outcast ghetto. A son and his girlfriend have just brutally murdered his parents and are about to stuff the bodies in the bathtub, set the house afire, and escape with whatever they can find in the house to hock once they arrive in the nearest big city. This is the meanest of Nakagami's tales, yet the most expert in local dialect and dialogue. The translator knows his stuff. It is beautiful. We learn the motivation for such violence, we understand, we witness. I cannot say I like the story, but I am impressed both with Nakagami's sense of dialogue and with Rankin's skill in putting the dialogue into a sort of British accent. It works, and it is an interesting contrast to the American English of Zimmerman's translation.

Kenneth Richard, who taught at the University of Toronto for twenty-seven years, is now Professor of Comparative Culture at the Siebold University of Nagasaki, Japan.