The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto

Western readers often assume that Japan is one homogeneous culture, but Nakagami, award-winning burakumin writer, exposes the fissures behind this facade. Burakumin are outcast Japanese, marginalized and degraded by a centuries-old belief that they are mysteriously ""tainted"" with impure blood. Nakagami, who died in 1992 at the age of 46, was the first to achieve literary success while documenting this oppressive legacy. The title novella, ""The Cape,"" introduces Akiyuki, like Nakagami himself an illegitimate son. The story, set in the Kishu region of Japan, centers around one extended and discordant family. A ceremony is held to honor Akiyuki's mother's first legal husband, while Akiyuki's biological father, ""that man,"" is reputed to recklessly haunt the red light district's prostitutes. A man on Akiyuki's construction crew, Yasuo, has killed another worker on the crew, Furuichi, and the community turns on itself, in grief and blame. Akiyuki's conflicted feelings about his father merge with a desire for self-obliteration, and he seeks and beds the prostitute he believes is his father's daughter, his own half-sister. In ""House on Fire,"" we continue with Akiyuki's story, and learn more about his father, Yasu, a violent pyromaniac. Akiyuki, in a new city and married, descends into alcoholic violence, beating his wife viciously after learning that Yasu has been fatally injured in a motorcycle accident. In these stories, Nakagami is unrelentingly grim, showing a Zola-like obsession with inherited traits. In the final entry, ""Red Hair,"" Nakagami gives rein to his erotic side, depicting the frenzied and strange coupling of Kozo, a construction worker, and a mysterious red-haired hitchhiker. Nakagami's tough, ruthless prose is often abstruse, with a taut psychological subtext, while elsewhere the clarity is unassailable: his detailing of the desperate passions in a Japanese ghetto rupture American stereotypes of the peaceful, impassive ""nature"" of the Japanese. (May) FYI: The Cape won the Akutagawa Prize in 1976.