Kenji Nakagami

Japanese novelist and essayist
Kenji Nakagami (中上健次) was a Japanese novelist and essayist. He is well known as the first, and so far the only, post war Japanese writer to identify himself publicly as a Burakumin, a member of one of Japan's long suffering outcaste groups. His works depict the intense life experiences of men and women struggling to survive in a Burakumin community in western Japan. His most celebrated novels include Misaki (The Cape), which won the Akutagawa Prize in 1976, and Karekinada (The Sea of Withered Trees), which won both the Mainichi and Geijutsu Literary Prizes in 1977. During the 1980s Nakagami was an active and controversial figure in the Japanese literary world, and his work was the subject of much debate among scholars and literary critics. As one reviewer put it, "Nakagami was the first writer from the ghetto to make it into the mainstream and to attempt to tell other Japanese, however fictively or even fantastically, about life at the rough end of the economic miracle." Nakagami was at the height of his fame when he died, of kidney cancer, at the age of 46.

Hanzo's Bird (Trans. Ian Hideo Levy)　Nihon Honyakuka Yosei Center, 1983. The Immortal (Trans. Mark Harbison) in The Showa Anthology: Modern Japanese Short Stories, Kodansha International, 1985. The Cape and other stories from the Japanese Ghetto (Trans. Eve Zimmerman) Stonebridge Press, 1999. Snakelust (Trans. Andrew Rankin) Kodansha International, 1999.

Mille Ans de plaisir (Trans. Véronique Perrin), Fayard, 1988. La Mer aux arbres morts (Trans. Jacques Lalloz & Kohsuke Ohura), Fayard, 1989. Sur les ailes du soleil (Trans. Jacques Lalloz), Fayard, 1994. Hymne (Trans. Jacques Lévy), Fayard, 1995. Le bout du monde, moment suprême, Fayard, 2000. Miracle (Trans. Jacques Lévy), Editions Philippe Picquier, 2004. Le Cap (Trans. Jacques Lévy), Editions Philippe Picquier, 2004

Mats Karlsson, The Kumano Saga of Nakagami Kenji. Stockholm, 2001. Eve Zimmerman. Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction. Harvard, 2008. Anne Thelle. Negotiating Identity: Nakagami Kenji’s Kiseki and the Power of the Tale. Iudicium, 2010. Anne McKnight. Nakagami: Japan, Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity. University of Minnesota, 2011. Machiko Ishikawa. Paradox and Representation: Silenced Voices in the Narratives of Nakagami Kenji. Cornell University Press, 2020.