Actually Pretty Good: The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu
On Augusto Higa Oshiro's unraveling diaspora novella
Recommendations are a funny thing; you can be given a book, told why you might like it, enjoy it and then think, wait, am I really like that? Is this my face for the world to see? So it went for Augusto Hiro Oshiro’s 2005 novella The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, translated by Jennifer Shyue and put out this year by Archipelago Books, which was given to me by a kind coworker who thought it might be ‘my kind of book.’ What she meant was translated, meditative, concise, and from a small press, but it turned out to also be a book about a man walking around a city slowly going mad and thinking about dying, which is actually exactly my kind of thing. I just didn’t realize it was so obvious to everyone else!
The titular Katzuo Nakamatsu is the unraveling perambulator, an older nikkei Japanese-Peruvian man who works as a literature professor in Lima. He’s unceremoniously ousted from his job at the university, and with nothing else to do, takes up long, rambling walks around Lima, visiting friends (old as well as dearly departed) and making himself into a strange fixture of various neighborhoods. Nakamatsu is followed on these walks by inexplicable sounds and eerie visions, whether of the poet Martin Adan or of his own ancestors, members of the original Japanese diaspora in Peru. What emerges is something like a competing set of internal monologues, Nakamatsu’s thoughts (which tend towards the terminal) struggling for space against the words of his ancestors, who have an indomitable will and pride. Wrapping together all of these voices is that of the narrator, an outsider to the story who is making his own suppositions about Nakamatsu’s mental states, giving us one of those rare books suffused in a sense of uncertainty, at times switching to the conditional tense. “It’s possible Nakamatsu was now entering his most critical stage,” begins one chapter, and it’s this kind of unstable footing that allows a reader to more fully enter Nakamatsu’s mental state, which alternates between fixations on almost overwhelming beauty and scenes of abjection and violence.
The novel begins, fittingly, in a space of dislocation: a sakura garden in the Parque de la Exposicíon in downtown Lima, a stereotypically Japanese tree nestled among the local flora. As Nakamatsu takes in of the scene, cherry blossoms, karp ponds, the whole nine yards, something unexpected begins to form in him: “And in that fragment of an afternoon, from that imperturbable beauty, Nakamatsu noticed, sprang a death drive, a vicious feeling, like the sakura were transmitting extinction, a shattering, destruction.” The sakura is a tidy yet potent symbol of Nakamatsu’s ancestry, the ineluctable condition of the Japanese diaspora, “their indeterminate place at the margins of the country’s whites, cholos, and mestizos.” The death drive becomes literal, impelling Nakamatsu to take his wending, illusory walks through the city. “It wasn’t just in his head, the temperature had dropped, the dampness warping his bones, and the very streets were no longer visible, the pale light looking clotted, unreal, and beyond it no street corners existed, no businesses, residences, panels, lights, curbs: just emptiness. Katzuo idled outside of reality, body rigid, looking like a pale corpse...” He’s almost himself like a pre-ghost haunting the streets of the city before his own death.
And what does a ghost do besides go and visit their loved ones, their favorite spots? Nakamatsu, with nothing else to do, flits in and out of familiar territories, visiting his remaining family (his wife passed many years ago, and his memories of her make up some of the most touching passages of the book), the graves of his ancestors, and various nikkei spots around town, checking all the boxes, as it were, before he can leave the world. “In any case, he had gone a step further, taken the initiative, no choice but to deal with his private matters, serenely, unshakeable …” Lingering over Katzuo’s personal memories and relationships, though, are “a whirlwind of corrupted voices, chimerical scenes, unreal images that came and went, carving swirls and squalls into the imagination and the heart…” of his family and people’s history, including most prominently “the unfathomable Etsuko Untén,” a compatriot of his father who spent World War II defiantly expecting news of worldwide Japanese victory, indomitably supporting his old country even as his new one completely turns against him. He’s a strange mirror image of those Japanese soldiers who kept on fighting in the Pacific after the war; he might have a different knowledge than them, but he’s even further off from his original home, waging a battle just as futile.
If you don’t know much about the history of the Japanese diaspora in South America, well, neither did I; amid all of Nakamatsu’s devolvement, a clear picture emerges of the experiences of the Japanese in Peru, from the hardscrabble existence of the first refugees to arrive to the somewhat more assimilated experiences of the following generations. But the educative quality of the novel for ignorant North Americans like me pales in comparison to the artistic quality of the work, the way the loping clauses of the sentences imbue the strange constellations of hallucinatory voices and images with a sweeping power, the way that the unreal, the past, lays over the present like a palimpsest, makes vivid a city full of “eccentric people chatting under the sun, and a good piece of land to live on, to grow on, because everything here was hallucination and dream, nobody eats, nobody dreams, like everybody is dead.” In Nakamatsu’s pre-spiritual wanderings among the bustling living and dead we get something like a mix of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo and the disintegrative novels of Thomas Bernhard, and hopefully I’ve clocked at least a couple of you with a recommendation like that.
You can get The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu at your local bookstore, local library, or order online from Bookshop.org, where all purchases support independent bookstores (and also support, in a small way, this newsletter.)
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“Exactly my kind of thing”