Paradox and Representation

Silenced Voices in the Narratives of Nakagami Kenji

Machiko Iwahashi Ishikawa, Machiko Ishikawa

• Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501751943
• eBook ISBN: 9781501751950
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How can the "voiceless" voice be represented? This primary question underpins lshikawa's analysis of selected work by Buraku writer, Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992). In spite of his Buraku background, Nakagami's privilege as a writer made it difficult for him to "hear" and "represent" those voices silenced by mainstream social structures in Japan. This "paradox of representing the silenced voice" is the key theme of the book. Gayatri Spivak theorizes the (im)possibility of representing the voice of "subalterns," those oppressed by imperialism, patriarchy and heteronomativity. Arguing for Burakumin as Japan's "subalterns," Ishikawa draws on Spivak to analyze Nakagami' s texts.

The first half of the book revisits the theme of the transgressive Burakumin man. This section includes analysis of a seldom discussed narrative of a violent man and his silenced wife. The second half of the book focuses on the rarely heard voices of Burakumin women from the Akiyuki trilogy. Satoko, the prostitute, unknowingly commits incest with her half-brother, Akiyuki. The aged Yuki sacrifices her youth in a brothel to feed her fatherless family. The mute Moyo remains traumatized by rape. lshikawa' s close reading of Nakagami's representation of the silenced voices of these sexually stigmatized women is this book's unique contribution to Nakagami scholarship.

CHAPTER 1

The Paradox of Representation

Geopolitical Perspective of Kishū Kumano

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of a number of women postcolonial theorists whose work has been instrumental in profiling gender matters regarding those on the margins of society. Most notably, Spivak has been at the forefront of the push to give a voice to the silenced and the dispossessed. This chapter conducts a detailed discussion of the applicability of Spivak’s critique of representing the voice of the silenced subject to Nakagami’s perspective of mukoku, the silenced or those without a voice. Focusing on the geopolitical perspective of Nakagami’s writing, which is an important element in the work of scholars such as Spivak and postcolonial scholar Edward Said, I argue that Nakagami, like Spivak and Said, attempted to represent the silenced voice of Japanese society’s “other.”

Knowledge of Kishū Kumano¹ is essential to an interpretation of Nakagami’s narratives because an understanding of the relevance of this location is critical to interpreting the oppressed status of the writer’s characters. Nakagami’s narratives depict the otherness of Kishū Kumano, long regarded as komoriku, a hidden country, on the periphery of Japan. In his 1978 travel journal Kishū: Ki no kuni ne no kuni monogatari (Kishū: A tale of the country of trees, the country of roots, hereafter Kishū), Nakagami portrays this region as “the nation of darkness” where the “losers” have settled.² The term losers implies those who incurred social stigma (kegare in Yamamoto’s sense) through defeat or social marginalization, including ancient exiled nobles, rebellious farmers, and modern anarchists and socialists.³ The expression “nation of darkness” suggests that Nakagami’s view of Kishū Kumano as a historical site geographically situated as the inverse of the ancient capital Kyoto where the emperor, the symbol of hare (purity or glory), once lived.⁴ In other words, this nation of darkness is juxtaposed against the center of Japan, the political entity that operated under the brilliant auspices of the sun goddess. Traditionally renowned as a spiritual spot for healing abhorrent diseases like leprosy, Kumano was also known since ancient times as a place for salvation. Pilgrims, regardless of rank, sex, or place of residence, came to pay homage at the three shrines of Shingū, Hongū, and Nachi, collectively known as Kumano Sanzan. It was thus depicted paradoxically in folklore and myth as a sacred yet ominous realm of death and a place of revival that was inhabited by the marginalized and ostracized.⁵ As a realm of death, it was kegare (polluted).

I have noted Yamamoto’s view of kegare as including social dissent. In modern Kishū Kumano, this social dissent was most evident in the so-called High Treason incident (Taigyaku jiken, 1910–1911). This was an alleged 1910 socialist-anarchist plot to assassinate Emperor Meiji, and it led to the mass arrest of leftists and the execution of twelve accused, including prominent anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), in 1911. Since the postwar era, the incident has largely been regarded as a fabrication by the state. It also resulted in the conviction of six defendants from Shingū, the so-called Shingū Group, and the execution in January 1911, of two of them. This included local doctor and sometime physician to Kōtoku, Ōishi Seinosuke (1867–1911), regarded by authorities as the Shingū group leader.⁶ The Taigyaku jiken made a strong impression on Nakagami and is a theme that repeatedly erupts in his fictional narratives. In the 1977 essay titled “Watashi no naka no Nihonjin: Ōishi Seinosuke” (“A Japanese man on my Mind: Ōishi Seinosuke”), Nakagami discusses the incident and the brutality of the sentences visited on Ōishi and the other Shingū convicted. This short work confirms the author’s view of Kishū Kumano as a place that was historically “consigned to the cold” by the political center.⁷ The extract from this essay given below begins with reference to the Kojiki (A Record of Ancient Matters), the text compiled in 712 to justify the imperial authority of the time.⁸ The Tōsei, or defeat of the area by the mythical Emperor Jinmu, mentioned in the opening line was invoked repeatedly by Nakagami as a metonym for the subjugation of the local area by the center:

Kumano was the place to which the Emperor Jinmu came for the Tōsei [conquest of the east] and where, according to the Kojiki, “a large bear [could be seen] faintly moving around; then it disappeared. Then Kamu-yamato-iware-biko-no-mikoto [the Emperor Jinmu] suddenly felt faint; his troops also felt faint and lay down.”⁹ Kishū Kumano is always in darkness. Although situated close to the culture of the Kinki area, it is under the shadow of the Yamato Court. Throughout the Edo era, into the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, and even after the Meiji Restoration, the Kishū clan could not find their way into the halls of power. It might sound dramatic, but Kumano has always been consigned to the cold despite being featured in Japanese history since the time of ancient myth.¹⁰

Donald L. Philippi, the English translator of the Kojiki, notes that the reference to a “large bear” (kuma) signifies the unruly Kumano mountain deities, who initially transformed themselves into the form of a bear that cast a spell over Emperor Jinmu and his men. Jinmu was revived by a magical sword, whereupon the Kumano deities were “magically quelled.”¹¹ In the Kojiki, the derogatory attitude of the center toward the people of Kumano is evident by the fact that the latter are depicted as “men with tails.” Philippi cites commentary suggesting that early Japanese believed that indigenous people who lived in the mountains, given their “primitive” stage of cultural development, were animal-like and were therefore referred to as having tails.¹²

Noting that the Kii Peninsula, on which Kumano is located, is “a peninsula of darkness,” Nakagami goes on to observe that it was “no mystery”¹³ that Kishū Kumano was the home of various groups that had rebelled against authority. He gives details of the derogatory assumptions made by those conquering the people who fled to and were exiled or executed in Kumano. This included those defeated in the Saika ikki (Saika riots, 1577–1585), an uprising in Saika against oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), a brutal warlord who initiated political unification in early modern Japan. The leader of this uprising was the son of the lord of Saika Castle, Suzuki Magoichi (circa sixteenth century; birth and death dates uncertain), whose followers, armed with guns, were one of the most highly skilled and technologically advanced military units of the time.¹⁴ Ryūzō, the father of the eponymous protagonist of the Akiyuki trilogy, is depicted through intertextuality with the legend of Magoichi to emphasize his resentment toward authority. Further discussion of the use of this legend is found in chapter 3.

Nakagami regards the matters referred to above—the Taigyaku jiken, the Jinmu Tōsei, and the Saika ikki—as representative of the culture of political defeat that has marked the people of Kishū Kumano since ancient times.¹⁵ He notes that in the modern era, too, an event such as the High Treason incident was “inevitable” because Kishū Kumano people had an innate tendency to rebel against authority.¹⁶ The history of Kumano given here confirms the status of the area as komoriku, hidden country.

Nakagami’s representation of Kishū Kumano as a “nation of darkness” resonates with the etymology of the term Kumano, meaning both “field of bears” (熊野) and “the edge of a field” (隈野). In a 1985 interview with Jacques Derrida, Nakagami explained the paradox of the Kumano toponym:

Kumano is a strange place. Kumano means the edge of the field. … To sum up, the edge is a place in which there is no land, or the margin of something. … We can probably define Kumano as a place which exists nowhere, or as a place which exists even though it is invisible. So, as a land, Kumano is a place of paradox; it is a sort of paradoxical land. That is to say, … Kumano is a place in which inside and outside stick together, a place that is at once inside and outside. It is a place that eternally circulates, and since there are no breaks or divisions, it is a place that exists as a borderless zone.¹⁷

In response, Derrida suggests that Nakagami’s perspective when writing of Kumano is “not an ideological, philosophical or political justification of literature from the periphery,” but a critique of the concept of peripherality.¹⁸ Peripherality, as Derrida defines that concept in this interview, is something that presumes the binary structure of center/periphery. For the French thinker, the practice of “deconstruction,” while acknowledging the necessity of periphery, at the same time seeks to critique the hierarchical nature of binary structures. Informed by this perspective, Derrida views Nakagami as a writer who, although on the edge of periphery, nonetheless rejects peripherality as an ideology and tries to “shake” the binary opposites that have already been “invalidated” from inside and outside.¹⁹ A critique of binary opposites is acknowledged as one of the most important aspects in the work of Derrida and also of Spivak, who translated Derrida’s De la Grammatologie (1967, translated as Of Grammatolog y in 1976). It is also, as I further argue, a crucial element of Nakagami’s writing.

Nakagami’s unique interpretation of periphery is demonstrated in his construction of Kumano as “Japan’s South.” This view was influenced by William Faulkner’s ideas regarding the “curse” of the American South. According to Faulkner, this curse is “slavery, which is an intolerable condition—no man shall be enslaved—and the South has got to work that curse out.”²⁰ As Nakagami noted in his 1985 lecture titled “Faulkner, hanmo suru minami” (“Faulkner, the luxuriant South”), Faulkner’s literature largely enabled him to conceptualize and write about Kumano as a geopolitically marginalized South.²¹ My interest in this book is in Nakagami’s literary representation of the silenced people in the Japanese version of the “cursed” Southern community. In the main textual analysis section of the book, I examine Nakagami’s narratives as (borrowing Faulkner’s words) an attempt to “work out” the “intolerable condition” or “the curse” visited on the marginalized people of Kumano, the Japanese South. Although there is no slavery in Kumano, the area was “cursed” by social conditions that dehumanized hisabetsu buraku residents in a manner that might be seen as similar to slavery...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• References
• Matters of Technical Presentation
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Paradox of Representation
• Chapter 2 The Voice of a Transgressive Young Man
• Chapter 3 The Voice of an Illegitimate Son
• Chapter 4 The Voice of an Incestuous Sister
• Chapter 5 The Voices of Aged Buraku Women
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index