Nakagami Japan

<div>How do you write yourself into a literature that doesn't know you exist? This was the conundrum confronted by Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992) who counted himself among the <i>buraku-min</i> Japan's largest minority. His answer brought the histories and rhetorical traditions of <i>buraku</i> writing into the high culture of Japanese literature for the first time and helped establish him as the most canonical writer born in postwar Japan.</div> <div><br> In <i>Nakagami</i> Japan Anne McKnight shows how the writer's exploration of <i>buraku</i> led to a unique blend of fiction and ethnography-which amounted to nothing less than a reimagining of modern Japanese literature. McKnight develops a parallax view of Nakagami's achievement allowing us to see him much as he saw himself as a writer whose accomplishments traversed both <i>buraku</i> literary arts and high literary culture in Japan.</div> <div><br> As she considers the ways in which Nakagami and other twentieth-century writers used ethnography to shape Japanese literature McKnight reveals how ideas about language also imagined a transfigured relation to mainstream culture and politics. Her analysis of the resulting rhetorical activism lays bare Nakagami's unique blending of literature and ethnography within the context of twentieth-century ideas about race ethnicity and citizenship-in Japan but also on an international scale.</div>