Memories of the Soil from which Kenji Nakagami's Stories Emerge: The Period (1970s-1980s) when the Swell of Alleys and Narratives Shook

Memories of the Soil from which Kenji Nakagami's Stories Emerge: The Period (1970s-1980s) when the Swell of Alleys and Narratives Shook
In discussing Kenji Nakagami (1946-1992), it is impossible to separate the "land" in which he lived and wrote from the "times" in which he lived and wrote. In the 1970s, urbanization accelerated in Japan, rural communities collapsed, and young people were sucked into the cities as the basis of their lives. The young were sucked into the cities, along with the foundations of their lives. In an age when television and consumer culture covered the nation and regional differences were rapidly fading away, Nakagami sought to reach the universal by delving thoroughly into the local.
The narrator's consciousness sinks into the memory of the land and rises again, and the voices of the characters and ghosts of the past intertwine. At the heart of this vortex are blood and place, and at the core of Nakagami's literature lies a structure in which the destiny of the individual is always drawn back to the power of the land, family history, and the shadow of the local community. This was also a strong rebellion against the ongoing loss of homeland in postwar literature.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the heat of political struggles cooled off, and a style that emphasized individual feeling and lightness began to spread, and an urban, transparent style, represented by Haruki Murakami, emerged. Nakagami, on the other hand, stood at the opposite end of this trend and attempted to bring back to the center of literature the local voices that were being lost by weaving stories that were dense, earthy, and spellbinding to the point of being tied to the land. In the midst of rural decline, the dissolution of communities, and the growing anonymity of urban areas, the alleys he depicted became places where the voices of those who could not live and the wounds of history that society had tried to overlook could be picked up.
Kenji Nakagami's stylistic theory of land became the key to deciphering the cultural fault lines that Japan faced in the 1970s and 1980s, and his narrative was a sharp testimony that the land still cries out and the past still breathes in a Japanese society swept away by the waves of urbanization and homogenization.