274

SUMMARY

The Early Works of Nakagami Kenji:

On the Process of the Genesis of Tragedy

KAKIUCHI Kengo

Nakagami Kenji was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 1976; he was the rst recipient born after the

war. In a distinctive muscular prose, his winning novella,Misaki(The Cape), depicts the intense

relationships that form in the closed space of the roji (alleyways; the buraku or outcaste

neighborhood) of Shing on the Kii Peninsula, and the tragic vortex into which the characterslives are

swept as a result. The work instantly secured Nakagami

s place in the literary world as the rising star

of the new generation. The longer novel Karekinada (The Sea of Withered Trees) which followed as a

kind of sequel led the critic Et Jun to comment thatafter seventy years, Japanese naturalism may

have nally fullled its promise.The world of the alleys would also form the stage in dierent ways

for the later novels Sennen no kairaku (A Thousand Years of Pleasure), Chi no hate shij no toki (The

Ends of the Earth, A Moment Supreme), and Kiseki (Miracle), which consistently attained a high level

of literary achievement.

Critical evaluations and studies of Nakagami

s oeuvre have therefore tended to concentrate on the

series of works that began withThe Cape.As this approach suggests, Nakagami could be said to

have found the key to a ction of his own when he claimed the space of thealleys.

That space, however, did not exist a priori for the author. In his early writings he returned

repeatedly to a single incident, the sudden suicide of his older half-brother when Nakagami was twelve

years old, seeking a way to interrogate it within a ctional world and to sublimate it as literature.

Nakagami
s eventual problematization of his birthplace, his discovery and claiming of thealleysas a

charged space can be seen as hard-earned breakthroughs that were an extension of that early process.

In this paper, I postulate that if thealleyshave uncommon power as a literary space, then the search

for the essence of Nakagami

s ction should begin with the process of their genesis. Accordingly, I

examine the works fromUmi e(To the Sea, September 1967) toThe Cape(October 1975) in order

to look for continuity in the framing of problems and a process of change in their expression, and thus

to interpret Nakagami
s early work in terms of an organic, reiterative progression leading toThe

Cape.

The significance of discussing Nakagami

s early works lies in the resources that his repeated
 SUMMARY 273

explorations provide for the creation of a model of how literature can know, relativize, and affirm

reality. Years after his death was mourned asthe end of modern Japanese literature,to identify the

point of departure of Nakagamis writing and trace the locus of his early works should be of no small

value.