Magical Realism as Ideology: Narrative Evasions in the Work of Nakagami Kenji

Summary

Nakagami: ‘Even in Japan now lots of people read Latin American literature, and young Latin American authors are being introduced one after another. Senor Borges, as a person of the first generation [of the new Latin American writing], I wonder how you regard that?

Borges: ‘There is really nothing worth reading. Please go find some other culture.’ (Laughter)…

–Nakagami Kenji, America, America: Amerika, Amerika

Magic realism now comes to be understood as a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village or even tribal myth…. Recent debates, meanwhile, have complicated all this with yet a different kind of issue: namely the problem of the political or mystificatory value, respectively, of such texts.

–Fredric Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’

I’m haunted by one character in Mario Vargas Llosa's The Green House. He's known by the name Fushía – which could come from the Japanese surname Fujiya; he is often addressed by the nickname Japonito – the little Jap. (The English translation opts for Jappy – not a word I’ve ever heard.) He's wandered over the border from Brazil into Peru after a violent gaol-break: ‘Do you know that I sent them to the hospital? The newspapers talked about Japanese cruelty, … Oriental vengeance’. He will become a pirate, organising one group of native jungle ‘indios’ to prey on others and steal their hard-won rubber harvest. By the end of the novel, he is back in the jungle, ravaged by leprosy, a ‘small pile of living and bloody flesh’ (Vargas Llosa, p. 368).

Given the fact that Brazil and Peru were the two countries in South America which attracted the largest number of Japanese migrants from the late-nineteenth century to the first four decades of the twentieth, there is nothing surprising about a Japanese character popping up in South American writing. Observers of the political scene in Peru might even allow themselves the mildly Borgesian fantasy – in fact, I doubt they could resist it – of seeing in ‘el Japonito’ a cruel prefiguring of Vargas Llosa's political nemesis, Peruvian patriot, globe-trotting born-again Japanese citizen, Alberto Fujimori.

My own fantasy is more literary, if still Borgesian. My Fushía, or Fujiya, has wandered into Vargas Llosa's novelistic jungle of circa 1965 from a book by Nakagami Kenji.