was a

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others asp ...

and

essayist An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal ...

. He is well known as the first, and so far the only, post-war Japanese writer to identify himself publicly as a

Burakumin is a name for a low-status social group in Japan. It is a term for ethnic Japanese people with occupations considered as being associated with , such as executioners, undertakers, slaughterhouse workers, butchers, or tanners. During Japan's ...

, 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''), "Chapter Three considers Nakagami's masterpiece, the Akiyuki trilogy. Rather than the better known 1976 and 1977 works, 'Misaki' (The Cape) and Kareki nada (The Sea of Withered Trees), close attention is given to Chi no hate shijo no toki (1983, The End of the Earth, Supreme Time), written after Nakagami's declaration of his Burakumin background." 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."Mark Morris
"The Untouchables"
The New York Times, October 24, 1999. Nakagami was at the height of his fame when he died, of kidney cancer, at the age of 46.

Major works

*"Jukyu sai no chizu" (A Map by a Nineteen-year-old) 1974 *''Misaki'' (The Cape) 1976 *''Jain'' (Snakelust) 1976 *''Karekinada'' (The Sea of Withered Trees) 1977 *''Hosenka'' (Forget-me-nots) 1980 *''Chi no hate shijo no toki'' (Supreme Time at the End of the Earth) *''Sennen no yuraku'' (A Thousand Years of Pleasure) 1982 *''Nichirin no tsubasa'' (Wings of the Sun) 1984 *''Kiseki'' (Miracles) 1989 *''Sanka'' (Paean) 1990 *''Keibetsu'' (Scorn) 1992

Works available in English

*''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.

Works available in French

*''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

Books about Nakagami

*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.

References

Sources

Short biography in French

Kenji Nakagami
at J'Lit Books from Japan

at JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) {{DEFAULTSORT:Nakagami, Kenji 1946 births 1992 deaths 20th-century Japanese novelists Japanese critics Magic realism writers Akutagawa Prize winners Writers from Wakayama Prefecture Deaths from cancer in Japan Deaths from kidney cancer 20th-century Japanese poets International Writing Program alumni Columbia University people People from Shingū, Wakayama