• The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu
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Archipelago Books

The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu

The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu

by Augusto Higa Oshiro, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Shyue

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Available as E-Book Latin American Literature
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Katzuo Nakamatsu is at sea after being forced out of his job as a literature professor without warning. He retreats into flânerie, musing with imaginary interlocutors, roaming the streets of Lima, and reciting the poems of Martín Adán. Slowly, to the “steady beat of his reptile feet,” Nakamatsu arranges his quiet ceremony of farewell. With an electric lunacy, he spruces himself up with a pinstripe tie, tortoiseshell glasses, and wooden cane, taking on the costume of an old 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 Japanese-Peruvian identity. Reminiscent of Kurasawa’s film Ikiru, Enlightenment emerges from a dark and labyrinthine mindscape, unraveling toward sublime disintegration.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861528
Pages: 150
Publication Date:

Praise

Augusto Higa Oshiro’s 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 Shyue’s 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

Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, in Jennifer Shyue’s miraculous translation, is blowing my mind. Higa Oshiro's words take me back to the moment when I first fell in love with literature as the process of threading myself through someone else’s incomparable eye. Oshiro’s summoning of life, of death, of the anatomy of solitude and the tactility of sight, and of the anguish and indomitability of the diasporic ancestors, is the dream—and the exhilarated darkening—of that original feeling.
—Brandon Shimoda

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

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