Out of the Alleyway tells a story about the man Nakagami Kenji and, from that biographical perspective, reads him as an author. In other words, its primary interpretive stance views his fiction and critical writings in relation to his life—most importantly, the effect of his outcaste status as hisabetsu burakumin on his writings. The text is organized chronologically, beginning with Nakagami's childhood in Shingu City and his first literary endeavors in the genre of poetry, through his relocation to Tokyo and development into a mature and respected writer of shishôsetsu (biographical fiction), monogatari (fictional writings inspired and often adaptive and/or deconstructive of the literary canon), and literary/cultural criticism, to his untimely death in 1992. Out of the Alleyway will surely be read widely among students and teachers of Japanese literature, and most likely sections of it will be assigned in undergraduate classrooms.
Author Eve Zimmerman and I met Nakagami Kenji at the same time, when, as graduate school classmates at Columbia University, he came as a writer-in-residence for a year. As an individual, Nakagami was fierce, passionate, intellectually compelling, and louder than life. The friendships we formed with him endured. During his intermittent visits to New York subsequent to his year in residence at Columbia, classmates Katsuyo, Eve, and I were regularly summoned to various bars, eateries, and gatherings, where, usually drunk and loquacious, Nakagami held forth on all manner of intellectual, topical, and artistic topics. Eve began her dissertation focused on his literature. I later traveled to Shingu to watch the local fire festival from the foothills with the other women, while my husband of the time, Toshiaki, suited up in white with a camera and a torch to participate alongside Nakagami and others. I met his wife, Kasumi, and two of his three children, Suzushi and Nori. During her visits to Japan, Eve interviewed his mother, friends, and more. It is perhaps no surprise that, ultimately, her treatment of Nakagami and his writing has been deeply inflected by this personal relationship.
In her introduction, Zimmerman juxtaposes Edward Fowler's political critique of Nakagami for an insufficiency of social realism with my insistence on a clear distinction between the material buraku and Nakagami's trope of the roji (alley). Against our oppositional positions, she carefully positions her own study, intentionally imbricating his fiction with his life. Zimmerman insists, “We sacrifice something if we fault Nakagami for not being engaged enough [with social buraku issues], or if we deny the link between the real buraku of Shingû and Nakagami's roji. Simply stated, we lose the story of Nakagami Kenji himself and his connection to history” (p. 9). The book is bifurcated by a series of photos of Nakagami, his family, and his hometown, adding a visual element to the biographical anchoring. Among these photos, moreover, is the dedication by Nakagami to Eve in her copy of Sennen no yuraku, stating clearly, Hanzô wa ore datta (Hanzô was me).
Zimmerman argues that, because of his outcaste heritage, Nakagami's own positioning within the Japanese literary coterie, or bundan, was one of simultaneity, or being both insider and outsider at the same time. Moreover, she reads this biographical fact as the wellspring of a number of thematic and formal factors, or attributes of Nakagami's literary and critical writings. To begin with, she argues that it helped enable Nakagami to recognize what he called the “ho/seido” (codified system) of Japanese literature as “a set of verbal and visual associations that suppresses all expressions of heterodoxy” (p. 129). And it led him to overturn the dominant social codes in a series of symbolic inversions, substituting the profane for the sacred, or theorizing the interconnection between the two, as epitomized in the relation between the Japanese emperor and the burakumin. It also affected Nakagami's deconstructive project of reinvigorating the rubric of monogatari from the classical tradition, against which he attempted to formulate another way of conceiving and rewriting Japanese literary traditions and the canon. This positioning also lay at the root of Nakagami's more formal narrative experimentations, Zimmerman suggests, including such literary techniques as the alternation of a communal narrative voice and an individual perspective in “Nokori no hana,” and Sennen no yuraku, a narrative format that Zimmerman classifies as a kind of Bahktinian dialogism.
The chronological biography functions to anchor the study to a common theme, beyond which the discussion of Nakagami's texts is somewhat meandering. Zimmerman directs her analytic attention to thematic matters such as violence, brother–sister incest, and Oedipal issues, and attempts to counter discrimination in Nakagami's narratives. She also discusses structural elements including Nakagami's use of dialect and language in general, narrative style, appropriation of the literary conventions of shishôsetsu and monogatari, as well as of mythic antecedents. There is a lengthy section on Nakagami's critique of Tanizaki Jun'ichirô. Zimmerman's choice of texts for discussion is neither comprehensive nor thematically or critically/structurally consistent—a comment I intend as descriptive, rather than as a criticism. She takes up a selection of his critically acclaimed narratives, such as the Kumanoshû collection, the Akiyuki triology, “Jûroku no miyako,” and Sennen no yuraku.
Zimmerman also has a section devoted to his early poetry, and her description of influences such as Rimbaud on this body of work is informative and offers a thoughtful critical analysis of these poems to boot. There has been only limited attention to his early poetry in both Japanese and English-language secondary sources, and her discussion is one of the few to direct a serious critical gaze at this work. That being said, personally, I have found his early poetry largely immature, and, in fact, rather uninteresting—leading me to wonder whether she might have limited her discussion of these poems to a descriptive one, and perhaps redirected such serious analytic attention at his later poetry. Her study does not deal much with his late texts, such as Izoku or Sanka, among others.
Her critical methodology is similarly wide ranging. In her discussion of violence in Nakagami's texts, she proffers a Deleuzian interpretation of his use of violence as a sort of masochism, hence creative as a disavowal, or insistence on believing in the fiction that prefigures the shock of revelation of “the real.” In her section on Sennen no yuraku, she borrows Victor Turner's term paradox to discuss the interchangeability of categories and the postulation of pure possibility. She mobilizes Barbara Babcock's notion of “symbolic inversion” to describe Nakagami's inversion of the dominant codes of the monogatari.
In general, the study is well researched and documented, and Zimmerman has made good use of interviews alongside written sources. She was careful to acknowledge the handful of studies in English on Nakagami. The Japanese secondary sources on Nakagami are somewhat limited to a particular segment of the Japanese bundan who constellate around Karatani Kôjin, such as Watanabe Naomi, Suga Hidemi, and Yomota Inuhiko.
Zimmerman has clearly broken with such critics as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, who have all in different ways insisted on a constitutive distance between author and text. I, to the contrary, as is evident in my positioning on the relation of the roji to the material buraku, align myself more with their understanding of, for lack of a better word, “author function.” I won't rehash such an argument here. However, in closing, I feel compelled to ask, has Nakagami's outcaste status become the fetish that stands in for the lack, or inherent disjunction, between life and text?
