The Enlightenment of Augusto Higa Oshiro

Federico Perelmuter

Some say that the periphery exists in a certain delay, receiving news from the center once it has grown stale and its fashion has passed. The opposite is true: always tardy to the periphery’s discoveries, the center’s self-regard victimizes it into ignorance. When a great writer dies outside of the narrow subset of those selected for translation and subsequent canonization in English, the great tragedy is that publishers grow increasingly unlikely to translate them at all. Translated literature doesn’t sell, and if the author can’t at least be trotted out on tour in search of a couple extra purchases, the risk of failure grows. Although some authors from the periphery profit considerably—both monetarily and in terms of esteem—from translations of their work, the opportunity cost of non-translation is far greater. The center’s monolingual readers and critics remain deprived, ignorant of “distant” innovations. And of course, the periphery always gets screwed, left hungering for the Anglophone literary system’s wealth. When a great writer goes untranslated, nobody benefits.

One innovator untranslated in his lifetime was Peruvian author Augusto Higa Oshiro, who died on April 28, 2023. His relatively sleek production—he published three novels, three collections of stories, and a book-length essay—put Higa’s career at the center of late-twentieth-century Peruvian literature, and eventually made him a defining figure of South American nikkei writing. His masterpiece, the novella The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamtsu, was originally published in 2008. Finally available in English, in Jennifer Shyue’s illuminating translation, from Archipelago Books, the novel is a revelation: a sharp, chaotic flurry of insight and musical mess.

Katzuo Nakamatsu may have crowned Higa Oshiro’s career, but his publishing life began in the late 1960s. First to appear were the stories collected in Que te coma el tigre [May the Tiger Eat You], published in 1978. At the time, Oshiro was a member of the Narración group, a cluster of writers orbiting the homonymous, Marxist-leaning publication and advocating for a realist, politically committed aesthetics. Over the previous two decades, from Higa’s birth in 1946 to his coming of age in the late 1960s, Perú had changed radically, and Higa’s early writing took a particular interest in this transformation.

The 1950s generation, led by short story writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro—a key early influence—transformed the indigenista tradition that had defined Andean literature for centuries and originated in colonial-era challenges to brutal plans for enslavement and exploitation of indigenous populations. As Peruvian liberal democracy developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, indigenista writers—mostly white, aristocratic, and urban—opposed the association of indigenous identity with primitive violence and used their knowledge of these cultures to “speak for” indigenous people and debate their proper place in the new nation. Ribeyro, together with José María Árguedas and others, depicted the dramatic influx of indigenous migrants into the country’s famished, furiously growing cities, collapsing distinctions between city and countryside, white and indigenous, which were foundational for the genre.

Younger writers led Narración, but its membership was heavily intergenerational; notable figures in this regard included the Nikkei poet José Watanabe. In general, writers associated with the Narración group merged the prior generation’s urbanist impetus, the revolutionary leftist views widespread among Latin American intellectuals during that era, and an intense colloquialism. Oshiro was only twenty-five when he published his debut collection. Consistent with Narración’s aesthetics, May the Tiger Eat You evinced a sharp interest in capturing the lives and concerns of poor and lower-middle-class teenage mestizo boys, the children of migrant Indigenous people. It garnered some acclaim, including a review by Antonio Cornejo Polar, the most influential Peruvian critic of those years and himself a member of the 1950s generation. But Higa took a decade to publish another book. “The chores of survival,” as he put it in the introduction to his collected stories, took primacy.

The most remarkable aspect of Higa’s early and admittedly uneven work is his perfectly attuned ear. The unique language of his protagonists soaks the stories, imbues them with a precise generosity. No distant observer or uninvolved speaker, their world becomes Higa’s, its horrors and tragedies his own. Sharp realists are often accused of outsize empathy or some other variety of unique psychological acuity through which their stories come alive. I’m by no means suggesting Higa lacked this quality, but instead, that he privileged speaking their tongue, transforming his language into their own and through it, finding the deeper condition he would represent.

Take “El equipito de Mogollón” [“The Little Team from Mogollón”], the story that opens the book, less an exercise in realism than an enchanting deception conveying the synthesis of mythology, madness, and desire that characterizes South America’s relationship to soccer. The premise is simple, as Higa prefers: an anonymous spectator recounts his poor neighborhood team’s meteoric ascent to the top of their league, all the way to the game to go for promotion to a higher division. In a crushing final volta, their unnamed star player, to whom the story has been addressed, betrays the team in that final match, allegedly because he’d been offered a spot on a professional team and refused to play. Such attitude earned him a beating by the neighborhood, to which he owed everything, but the possibility of his individual success redeemed the betrayal somewhat. Alas, the opposing team had, in fact, “been paying you for many months, dear boy. You were short on cash, and a lack of money finishes the honorable man” (translation mine).

Betrayal is the central concern of Higa’s Dickensian ruffians and rapscallions, loyalty nonnegotiable in the throes of a vulnerable life. They court girls and occupy schools in protest until someone sells them out and forces an end to the flawed, fickle utopia of revolutionary adolescence. Subdued violence lingers in every move, but Higa’s fiction speaks to the social forces giving rise to this violence and its place within their world. Loyalty and revolution are not, for his boys, expressions of then-fashionable bourgeois militancy, but the bare necessities of survival in an urban environment designed to marginalize and brutalize them.

The contradictions of masculinity, which reveal the often impossible precarity in which his characters live, fascinate Higa. Samuel Díaz, the ancient protagonist of “Garrotillo” [“Little Club”], a story from his second collection, 1987’s La casa de Albaceleste [Albaceleste’s House], finds his cock growing unstoppably after he lusts for spry beauty María Monteza. In a final confrontation at a barbershop, she strikes him in the balls so hard that the voice of Samuel’s (most likely dead) mother awakens him: “Samuel Díaz rose from the bed in a sweat. He suddenly entered reality. Observed his room. Grabbed his head. Hurried to the bathroom, dropped his trousers, and, relieved, scrutinized his ancient and minuscule raw peanut.” In other stories, such as the scintillating “Clase media” [“Middle Class”], Higa captures the banal aggression of a group of escapist, impoverished young men wandering the city. And, in “Corazón sencillo” [“Simple Heart”] he narrates the life of the miserably poor yet quietly diligent janitor whose submissiveness to exploitation surprises even his exploiters. In the story’s final scene, he gives some playing children cookies and quietly climbs into the sky like an angel or a madman. To absorb violence quietly, to be betrayed by the fantasy of ultimate sexual conquest, or to forfeit sporting triumph for needed cash: men, and their self-destructive desire.

A conspicuous absence from Higa’s early fiction, including his first novel, 1992’s El final del porvenir [The End of the Future]: his own identity as a nisei, the Peruvian-born child of Okinawan immigrants to Peru. Nikkei-adjacent themes appear in this earlier period—most notably, “Simple Heart” is modeled on a story by Japanese master Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, although Higa claims to have encountered his work in an anthology of fantastic literature (edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Victoria Ocampo). Instead, the stories of this period take a stronger interest in the plight of a mestizo working class.

Higa’s unmentioned identity became more conspicuous when he left Peru for Japan in the early 90s. Pacific Latin America’s centuries-old relationship with Japan, which traces back to the colonial era, led Peru to welcome Japanese immigration earlier than any other country in the region. The early-twentieth-century migrant wave that brought Higa’s family to Peru mostly consisted of impoverished farmworkers, but the Nikkei community has grown steadily since then. Japanese law eventually designed programs for the descendants of emigrants to work and live for a period in Japan. Higa thus left for Japan, motivated in part by his own (and Peru’s) dire economic straits, only to experience brutal discrimination and exploitation. Higa returned to Peru, then governed by (also nisei) right-wing dictator Alberto Fujimori. His book-length account of his misery abroad, Japón no da dos oportunidades [No Second Chances in Japan], articulated the collapse of his idealism about Japan and Japanese identity.

Thereafter, Higa’s work changed. Nikkei themes were at the center of his final collection, Okinawa existe [Okinawa Exists] from 2013, and his final novel, Gaijin, from 2014, while references to Japanese literature multiplied. They are central to The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, the story of a professor of literature, like Higa, who finds himself aged out and forced to retire from the job he has performed for thirty-odd years. Katzuo is mostly a loner who spends his days wandering the darkened streets of Lima thinking of Martín Adán—a famously obscure, marginal Peruvian poet—and his long-dead wife, Keiko. The book opens peacefully, with Katzuo at the Parque de la Exposición, smoking a cigarette and enjoying the environment. Then:

In the eternity of the instant, in a manner of speaking, the green of the afternoon flickered out, the park’s babbling was erased, as if the world had taken flight, the pebbled paths disappeared, no serene gardens, or laughing families, or murmuring young couples, or ponds full of fish: the only thing in the air now was the Sakura tree, its branches and luminous flowers. And in that fragment of afternoon, from that imperturbable beauty, Nakamatsu noticed, sprang a death drive, a vicious feeling, like the Sakura were transmitting extinction, a shattering, destruction.

The feeling apparently passes, but it shakes Katzuo loose, muddling his mind over the course of a frenzied paragraph that extends for multiple pages and catalogs his evolving symptoms and aimless, terrified wandering. The chaos of his mind quiets when he understands that, unlike most of Lima’s inhabitants, he had never “been able to join this reality, he had simply lived it indifferently, distantly, not getting involved, impassive, strange, marginal, he was after all the son of Japanese people, a nisei, almost a foreigner.” Marginality and its pain return after years of simulated indifference, and Katzuo rehearses the familiar story of half-included nisei who will always bear the marks of foreignness. He carries a uniquely wounded history, no matter his degrees or profession. The sight of Sakura blossoms unsettles Katzuo, triggering a still-diffuse onslaught, a pained nearness to the other side in their pastel flesh. A world once light and illuminated darkens into a deathly laden inferno.

This first incident is mild by comparison, but the intensity of Katzuo’s outbreaks only increases, showing the (self-)deception at the core of his quiet, Stoner-esque life, devoted as it was to Adán and, in later years, a history of the Japanese families of his childhood Lima neighborhood. More explicitly autobiographical than any of his fiction up to that point, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu renders Higa into a Gogolian archetype, squeezed by contradictions he once forced himself to forget.

In the novel’s second chapter, a would-be thief is shot by his intended mark. He lies dead in the street, covered by a flapping newspaper, and after Katzuo curiously rushes over, the sight leaves him “captivated by the impassive flesh” of the gunshot corpse yet almost unmoved. Just prior, Katzuo had been eating yushime, an Okinawan soup “that would bring back the flavors of his bygone childhood, now that his consciousness was full of indecipherable voices” and discussing childhood among the children of Japanese immigrants at a friendly family’s restaurant. After the shooting, he immediately sets off again, back to wandering like a traumatized flaneur. He ultimately arrives at a friend’s house to borrow a gun and ask how best to set it on oneself before heading off.

Katzuo’s madness unspools in the paths that hurt has traveled, fermented and unspoken for decades. The voices he hears, at first unspecific, begin as the sound of urban wilderness, trees and squirrels and birds, but they quickly resolve into those of his ancestors. Katzuo lost his connection to the Nikkei community when his wife died, and he visits the cemetery where she and his parents lie. He observes his family’s memorial rituals in a remarkable scene, evincing surprising composure in the face of melancholy over the loss of “those spirits that constituted his blood, his substance, and that tiny island of memory rooting him in this country.” Katzuo’s parents suffered in Peru, and for a great time he was indifferent, not quite understanding, too focused on chasing success, “never making a misstep.” Upward striving and unspeakable, indeed unspoken pain blinded Katzuo. With everything else—job, wife, friends, intellect—gone, the question of belonging returns.

Higa’s erstwhile interest in a tight, attentive literary language from which characters emerge almost by necessity is on display throughout Enlightenment, particularly as its voices proliferate. The novel’s layers and perspectives, including that of its late-appearing narrator Benito Gutti—one of Katzuo’s colleagues whom the fraying man began visiting after his dismissal from the university—blend and shift from one paragraph to the next. As the story progresses and the boundaries of self-consciousness collapse, the story of a man’s dissolution toward repressed trauma and contradictory identity evolves into the story of a haunted artist, incapable of confining his inventions to the page.

As Katzuo dissolves, the voices resolve and acquire personality, clearly connected to his family history. One of the most prominent of those personalities is Etsuko Untén, “a haughty Japanese man, friend of his father,” who remained a resolute nationalist during World War II. A terrifying man, utterly marginal and unafraid of violence, Katzuo’s faded, half-fabricated invocation of him eventually hyphenates with Martín Adán in search of punishment or retribution. Suffering, Untén-Adán claims, and Katzuo agrees, will purify his mind, erase “his unwholesome I.” This voice, which sometimes seems closer to a spirit floating above the world, addresses Katzuo as it recreates, in all its misery, his father’s and his friends’ immigration to Peru circa 1918. Eventually escaping the virtual enslavement into which they were forced upon arrival, the immigrants went their separate ways. But then the war came in 1941 and Untén returned to Lima searching for a way to support the war effort. He encountered little support. The backlash against the Japanese population, influenced by the United States’ maneuvers to exert influence throughout the continent, was swift. Violent expropriations, jailings, extortions, police persecutions, public shamings, family separations, even deportation to U.S. internment camps. Katzuo, through the eyes of the enraged Untén, “saw them terrorized in the street, those infants, those women pleading, tearful, those Japanese people who went into hiding, others who fled to the sierra, jobless, unable to leave the house, because the neighbors threw rocks at us, we were enemy, we were nihonjin [Japanese], living a war we hadn’t asked for.” Katzuo and Untén fuse, their voices and bodies indistinguishable at times, as we shuttle back and forth between the war years and the present. Despite his rage and heartbreak, Untén hopes for an opportunity to fight for the motherland he left behind—or at least defend his compatriots—while Katzuo continues in his deranged, ecstatic wandering.

Lost amid history, Higa’s masterpiece scratches at the twentieth century’s most intimate and global horrors, from war to racism, and the concomitant tragedies of old age, loneliness, familial collapse, and cultural immiseration. In Higa’s telling, the artist becomes a spent being, breathless and frail, lonely but inspired. Yet, before blacking out, ceding ground to Untén and the haunting voices of unredeemed history, Katzuo ecstatically affirms: “Beauty does exist!”

The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu is as compressed as a dream; it is a succinct diasporic spiral remaking Lima in the wake of its protagonist’s tortured illuminations. Higa Oshiro has passed on, leaving behind an oeuvre whose concision belies a genius for language capable of enlivening everyday lives into constellations of meaning. What remains, lighting the starless night of non-translation and ignominy, is the beauty.

Federico Perelmuter is a writer from Buenos Aires.

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