The Enlightenment Of Katzuo Nakamatsu

(Paperback)

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Reminiscent of Kurasawa's film Ikiru, Enlightenment explores the interior mindscape of a Japanese-Peruvian man and his luminous unraveling Katzuo Nakamatsu is having a recurring dream. He's strolling down the glinting avenues of Lima, branches crowning overhead, when he hears someone snickering from the shadows. He wanders away in concentric circles, as if along a spider web, and wakes in a sweaty torment. Nakamatsu sleepwalks his way toward sublime disintegration. Katzuo is at sea after being forced out of his job as a literature professor without warning. He retreats into fl nerie, musing with imaginary interlocuters, roaming the streets, and reciting the poems of Martin Adan. Slowly, to the "steady beat of his reptilian feet," Nakamatsu begins to arrange his muted ceremony of farewell. He conjures his smiling wife Keiko and wonders how he lost his Japanese community with her death. With a certain electric lunacy, he spruces himself up with a pinstripe tie, tortoiseshell glasses, and wooden cane, taking on the costume of a man he knew as a child, hoping to grasp that man's tenacious Japanese identity. Like a logic puzzle, Enlightenment calibrates Augusto Higa Oshiro's own entangled identity. From this dark and deadly estrangement, a piercing question emerges- "Why did our hides, our Japanese eyes, our bodily humours, provoke suspicion and rejection"

Reviews

Oshiro explores issues of grief, ethnic identity, and aging in his feverish English-language debut . . .The prose itself is dreamlike, with long complex sentences evoking a lush garden, the bustle of a college campus, or the dangerous streets of Limas seedy district, as Katzuo searches for his former self . . . Oshiro . . . touches the readers soul.
--Publishers Weekly

"[Nakamatsu] 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 . . . A powerful, provocative . . . evocation of a mind unraveling."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Talented polyglot Shyue enables Oshiros debut in English, rendering Oshiros dense,lyrical prose into a resonating anti-bildungsroman of a mans dissolution."
--Booklist

"A gripping, delirious ode to the Japanese diaspora in Peru. Higa Oshiro's tale of death-driven paranoia, suicidal obsession, and the persistent ghosts of national origin is captured in astute and heartwrenching English by Jennifer Shyue."
--Kit Schluter,author of Pierrot's Fingernails

"Augusto Higa Oshiros The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, in Jennifer Shyues miraculous translation,is blowing my mind. Higa Oshiro's wordstake me back to the moment when I first fell in love with literature as the process of threading myself through someone elses incomparable eye. Oshiros summoning of life, of death, of the anatomy of solitude and the tactility of sight, and of the anguish andindomitabilityof the diasporic ancestors, is the dreamand the exhilarated darkeningof that original feeling."
--Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall

Augusto Higa Oshiros febrile portrait of a man slowly losing his mind reads like a fever dream or an exorcism. After being forced to retire, Professor Katzuo Nakamatsu roams the streets of Lima mixing with other outcasts, expressing queer desire, and longing for love in a society where he and other Japanese Peruvians are detested rancorously, hostilely, hatefully. Jennifer Shyues translation is breathtaking, each sentence gleaming with an intense, strange beauty, as Higa Oshiro limns the charms of the night and the blackness of the world in this unforgettable novella.
--May-lee Chai, author of Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories and Useful Phrases for Immigrants, winner of the American Book Award

Higa Oshiro writes this book very well, describing Katzuo gradual descent into illumination, Kensh or madness . . . His portrayal of Katzuos unsuccessful struggle to come to terms with his life as a Peruvian of Japanese origin is first-class.
--The Modern Novel

"Translator Jennifer Shyue renders Oshiro into an impressively distinctive English. One that is, as she puts it, breathless. Gasping even, during swells of Nakamatsus torture, with clauses expanding and contracting like the panicked panting of drowning lungs. When in gentler reverie, the commas give rise to a soft swaying, like a bench swing lightly propelled, as by bare toes pushing off park grass. AfterEnlightenment, the duos prose rhythms continue to flicker and rock in the readers ear."
--Alex Tedesco, Blathering Struldbrugs

Author Bio

Augusto Higa Oshiro is a Peruvian writer born to immigrants from Okinawa and raised in Lima's working-class center. In the '70s he was a member of Peru's Grupo Narraci n, a group of writers focused on realist, working-class fiction. He is the recipient of the Asociaci n Peruano Japonesa's Premio Jose Watanabe Varas for prose and the Camara Peruana del Libro's Premio de Novela Breve, and has been recognized for his contributions to culture by Peru's Ministry of Culture. The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu will be his first book translated into English. Jennifer Shyue's translations focus on contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers. She has an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and a BA in comparative literature from Princeton University. Her work has been supported by grants from Fulbright, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa and has appeared in The Arkansas International, New England Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.