Kenji Nakagami's Stories Emerge from the Memories of the Soil: A Time when Alleys and Narrative Swells Shook the Countryside (1970s-1980s)

Kenji Nakagami's Stories Emerge from the Memories of the Soil: A Time when Alleys and Narrative Swells Shook the Countryside (1970s-1980s)
Kenji Nakagami's literature can be positioned as an effort to bring back the memories of the land and the voices of the community that were being lost during the rapid urbanization and homogenization of Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. The alleyways of Shingu, Wakayama, which he depicted, were places with a complex history, including that of an oppressed tribe, and intertwined with the memories of people who had been cut off by modernization. In an age when television and consumer culture have overtaken the nation, young people are fleeing to the cities, and regional differences are fading away, Nakagami's narrative is dense and earthy, with the breath of local time pulsating through it. The narrator's consciousness sinks deep into the land and surfaces again, while the ghosts of the past and the figures of the present rise up in a single stream. This structure was a strong reaction against postwar society's increasing loss of homeland, and formed a unique worldview in which the
bonds of land and blood determine the fate of the individual.
In the literary circles of the same period, political fervor was fading, urban and transparent writing styles were spreading, and literature emphasizing a sense of lightness was on the rise. While the pop narratives of the Haruki Murakami style became mainstream, Nakagami depicted the weight of life and the reverberations of community as the opposite, placing the voices of the unspeakable people swept away by the waves of modernization at the center of his literature. His works are an attempt to make local history visible again and present the very breath of the land itself as literature, and are a key to deciphering the fault lines in Japanese culture from the 1970s to the 1980s.