Gossip and history

The writings of William Faulkner had been introduced to Japan before the war, then became popularized during the 1950s. While some Japanese writers read Faulkner as an exemplar of European Modernism and others, such as Oe Kenzaburō, might interpret his works as essentially American, it would be Nakagami Kenji's insight that Faulkner was fundamentally a writer of the South and that the South is a most mobile region. Nakagami attributed to his reading of Faulkner the discovery of gossip as a form of narration, one well suited to portray his particular reworking of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: the burakumin community of the roji alleyways. His reading of Gabriel García Márquez provided triangulation for the narrative project of depicting a culture of defeat. Nakagami's seemingly contradictory wager ‐ to out‐Faulkner Faulkner in the creation of a demonic patriarch at the centre of a peripheral, excluded community ‐ generated the figures of Akiyuki and his father Hamamura Ryūzō. Their confrontation forms the core of Nakagami's stories from ‘Misaki’ to Chi no hate, shijō no toki. The collapse of this fictional patriarchy owes much to a Japanese history of discrimination and to Nakagami's allegiance to the structure of defeat in the narrative worlds of his fellow Southern writers, Faulkner and García Márquez

Art · Garcia · Humanities · Literature · Narrative · Asian Culture and Media Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy

• Nakagami and the Denial of Lineage

  Margherita Long•differences•2006

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• The Fictional Father

  Peggy Kamuf, Robert C Davis•The Bulletin of the Midwest…•1982

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• Contemporary Japanese Literature

  John Whittier Treat, Ivar Ivask•Monumenta Nipponica•1989

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• Faulkner Studies in Japan

  Don L Cook, Kenzaburo Ohashi et al.•American Literature•1986

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