March 20, 2023
Peruvian writer Oshiro explores issues of grief, ethnic identity, and aging in his feverish English-language debut. While walking through a park in Lima, professor Katzuo Nakamatsu, 58, is overcome by the sensation that he’s dead. Despite recognizing the insanity of this feeling, he can’t shake it, and he descends into a state of perpetual listlessness. Is it an omen or a self-fulfilling prophecy when he returns to campus and is abruptly laid off because of his age? A long period of aimlessness and self-reflection follows. He traces a large part of his alienation to his identity as the son of Japanese immigrants, reminding himself that “the Japanese weren’t wanted anywhere... nobody opened their arms.” The prose itself is dreamlike, with long complex sentences evoking a lush garden, the bustle of a college campus, or the dangerous streets of Lima’s seedy district, as Katzuo searches for his former self and lingers on memories of his wife, who died years earlier from cancer. Even when Katzuo is admitted to a psychiatric hospital, there’s a peaceful lyricism to the storytelling. Also moving is the solace Katzuo finds in the work of Martín Adán, his literary idol, whose wandering “reached the other side of human wretchedness.” Oshiro, too, touches the reader’s soul.
April 1, 2023
A professor finds himself slipping toward madness, depression, and perhaps spiritual enlightenment. Initially, the title character seems like a sort of Everyman on the precipice of existential crisis. He is enjoying a lovely day, "filling him with a private joy and, he believed, a secret spirituality." Until, all of a sudden, he isn't. Once everything shifts without warning, he becomes filled with dread, obsessed with his mortality, "unable to dislodge that feeling of death." And once he knows he's going to die, down to the marrow of his bones, everything either falls apart or comes together. But this short novel, originally published in 2005 (though not translated into English until now), proceeds into some details that make the context more specific. Like the author, the protagonist is a Peruvian novelist of Japanese descent very much aware of his outsider status in Lima, where the large Japanese population found itself even more than usually targeted by racism and discrimination during World War II. The title character has also been suffering from some mental issues and has been taking medication and a few days off from work. When he returns, he finds he has been forced into retirement, which accelerates his downward spiral. He is a man of order in a world that increasingly seems disordered to him, where he feels threatened by others that no one else sees, bombarded by sounds that no one else hears. Death might seem like a respite to him. He has a few friends, one of whom consents to lend him a pistol, but has no close family. His wife is long dead, a young cancer victim, and they were pretty much opposites when they were married. He retreats further into the terror and madness of himself until he proceeds into the "enlightenment" of the title, confronting and exorcising some of the demons of his heritage in the process. A powerful, provocative, and occasionally puzzling evocation of a mind unraveling.
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May 1, 2023
Katzuo Nakamatsu used to be "the irreproachable, reliable professor," until a letter unceremoniously announced his forced retirement. "He was fifty-eight, depleted, old, death was approaching indifferently." His wife died 25 years ago, felled by cancer at just 39. He's childless and parentless and virtually estranged from his more successful siblings. He draws empathic comfort in the (waning) life of poet Mart�n Ad�n, who succumbed to mental illness and alcoholism. Nakamatsu, too, continues to withdraw as he wanders the streets of Lima in a fever dream, haunted by bouts of the "clamoring" and "keening" of "colorful wild birds," not unlike a chorus of ghosts from a collective past endured by generations of Japanese immigrants to Peru, "facing up to hatred and rancor born of their being foreigners." In this slim novel originally published in 2003, lauded Peruvian Oshiro manages to expose decades of invisible history, including the U.S.-initiated deportation of Japanese Peruvians to U.S. prison camps during WWII. Talented polyglot Shyue enables Oshiro's debut in English, rendering Oshiro's dense, lyrical prose into a resonating anti-bildungsroman of a man's dissolution.
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