Kenji Nakagami: The Cape, and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto

Kenji Nakagami
The Cape, and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto
Stone Bridge Press

THE LATE JAPANESE writer Kenji Nakagami was barakumin--a Japanese outcaste. It was in this context that he came to prominence in the 1970s with stories that frankly depicted life among the barakumin.

The Cape's three stories, which were first published in Japan in the '70s, don't focus much on exactly what forms social oppression took. Instead, Nakagami's writing addresses the presumed effects of the outcaste life (alcoholism, rape, murder, suicide), as he tells the stories of construction workers and prostitutes in a small coastal town.

So the oppression of Nakagami's people has to be taken on faith, to some extent. (Not difficult, this, as oppression tends to be a depressingly universal phenomenon.) More of a concern, though, is the fact that much of The Cape is seen through a dull haze of tragedy and disappointment, which ultimately proves more wearying than interesting. In the middle of the first story, "The Cape," a man stabs and kills his brother-in-law, and while the act sets off various breakdowns in his extended family, very little thought is given to exactly why the stabbing occurred in the first place. The question simply isn't asked.

The second story, "House on Fire," deals with the sniping relations in the same extended family at a different point in time. "Red Hair," the third story, nearly redeems the book, even if its inclusion is jarring enough to seem almost accidental. In this piece, which ostensibly takes place in the same town, a construction worker picks up a female hitchhiker, and the two embark on a dizzyingly effortless, almost obsessive affair, in which the two dine and talk and screw till they're sore. And unlike the rest of The Cape, the 20-odd pages of "Red Hair" hum with a raw abandon and hard, sharp words that sometimes land like slaps. In the gleeful oblivion of this language, there's a hope--perhaps foolish--for a few glimpses of true happiness. But it's a hope that casts the rest of the book in stark contrast, illuminating the town around the lovers' heated bodies, and the chapters around their smoldering words.