ABSTRACT
Nakagami Kenji’s Kishu¯: Ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari (Ki Province: the tale of the land of trees and the land of roots) is the record of a “story gathering” expedition made by the writer Nakagami in 1977 to the various towns and villages of the Kii peninsula, particularly those designated as hisabetsu buraku, or the quarters of those discriminated against.2 The narrative was published in 25 installments in the popular Asahi Journal weekly newsmagazine from July 1977-January 1978.3
My copy of Kishu¯ is from the Nakagami Kenji zenshu¯, where it occupies a place within the final two-volume selection of non-fiction, Vols 14 and 15.4 In the chronological table that accompanies the complete works, Kishu¯ is classified as “dokumento” or “document” and also as “reportage” (ruporuta¯jyu). The installments, now chapter headings, consist of the names of the places he visits – the city of Shingu¯, the town of Koza, or the village of Hiki. These 23 chapters are framed by an opening preface called, appropriately, “Preface,” and a conclusion entitled, “Final installment: The nation of darkness.” In the tradition of a travelogue, Nakagami himself is the narrator, hence the overt, identified mediator between the stories he hears and landscapes and people he encounters, more in the style of contemporary ethnography in which the anthropologist identifies and confronts her position directly, rather than earlier attempts at putatively purely “objective” reportage.5 The chapters in-between the preface and final installment are filled with embedded narrations by or descriptively about the local residents of Ki Province, including many who are elderly and illiterate. These narrations may include their life stories – thus resembling oral histories – and amusing or moving local anecdotes, regional songs, or histories of their localities, and so forth. Nakagami’s musings on and associations to these embedded narratives are interspersed throughout. Many – although certainly not all – of these stories remind Nakagami of a host of uncanny tales of archaic and premodern Japan, and which thus constitute a disavowed (repressed yet familiar) cultural past that returns to trouble contemporary national myth.6 For example, upon completing his description of the rowdy comraderie between three young men in the town of Asso, who tell him tall tales of wrestling matches and sports competitions, Nakagami comments, “Somehow it made me think of passages in Ueda Akinari’s ‘Hankai’ ” (p. 547).7
