When Kenji Nakagami burst onto the literary scene in the 1970s, he was seen as a breath of fresh air in the stuffy world of Japanese letters. He came from "the Alley", the ghetto world of Japan's underclass that for centuries has been condemned to do "unclean" work. He had left school to work on construction sites, thought of becoming a sumo wrestler, and then, out of the blue, won a major literary prize. The seven stories collected here span the whole range of his writing. Nakagami's birthplace was a mountainous region of dense forests, waterfalls, and remote temples. Nakagami draws on this background in several tales of red-eyed demons and mountain bandits, but he focuses mainly on the violent lives of his contemporaries: drunks and day laborers, gamblers and battered wives. His prose is tough, spare, and stylish, making him known to many of his readers as the Japanese Hemingway.
Author
See 中上 健次. Kenji Nakagami (中上健次 Nakagami Kenji, August 2, 1946 – August 12, 1992) was a Japanese novelist and essayist. He is well known as the first, and so far the only, post-war Japanese writer to identify himself publicly as a Burakumin, a member of one of Japan’s long-suffering outcaste groups. His works depict the intense life-experiences of men and women struggling to survive in a Burakumin community in western Japan. His most celebrated novels include “Misaki” (The Cape), which won the Akutagawa Prize in 1976, and “Karekinada” (The Sea of Withered Trees), which won both the Mainichi and Geijutsu Literary Prizes in 1977. During the 1980s Nakagami was an active and controversial figure in the Japanese literary world, and his work was the subject of much debate among scholars and literary critics. As one reviewer put it, "Nakagami was the first writer from the ghetto to make it into the mainstream and to attempt to tell other Japanese, however fictively or even fantastically, about life at the rough end of the economic miracle." Nakagami was at the height of his fame when he died, of kidney cancer, at the age of 46. (from Wikipedia)
