THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF KATZUO NAKAMATSU by Augusto Higa Oshiro
The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, a novella by Okinawan Peruvian writer Augusto Higa Oshiro, was published by Archipelago Books in May 2023. 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. Named one of World Literature Today’s “75 Notable Translations of 2023” and Morning Star’s “Best of 2023: Letters from Latin America.” Translated from Spanish.
“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, author of Hydra Medusa
“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, author of Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories
“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 and translator
“The prose itself is dreamlike, with long complex sentences evoking a lush garden, the bustle of a college campus, or the dangerous streets of Lima’s seedy district […] Also moving is the solace Katzuo finds in the work of Martín Adán, his literary idol, whose wandering ‘reached the other side of human wretchedness.’ Oshiro, too, touches the reader’s soul.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A powerful, provocative, and occasionally puzzling evocation of a mind unraveling.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In this slim novel originally published in 2003, lauded Peruvian Oshiro manages to expose decades of invisible history, including the U.S.-initiated deportation of Japanese Peruvians to U.S. prison camps during WWII. Talented polyglot Shyue enables Oshiro’s debut in English, rendering Oshiro’s dense, lyrical prose into a resonating anti-bildungsroman of a man’s dissolution.”
—Terry Hong, Booklist
“In Higa Oshiro's writing, this ‘testimony of a past sealed off’ feels natural; each sentence and paragraph is porous, open to slippage of all sorts. It is beautiful writing, rendered beautifully by Jennifer Shyue.”
—Lily Meyer, NPR
“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.”
—Federico Perelmuter, Southwest Review
“In this vortex of language and culture, the translator’s task is all the more essential and Jennifer Shyue’s translation from Spanish is both precise and poetic. In addition to the music of the prose, Shyue does justice to the multiple vernacular at play, bringing two unlike cultures into the portrait of a single man.”
—Kassia Osset, The Rumpus
“This novel is an arresting tour de force by one of Peru’s most distinctive voices and a must-read.”
—Leo Boix, The Morning Star
“The Enlightenment is a labyrinthine, dizzying narrative that often renders the reader breathless, and Jennifer Shyue’s translation superbly captures its various nuances, from the most delicate to the most brutal aspects of Katzuo Nakamatsu’s world.”
—Cristina Pinto-Bailey, World Literature Today
“Jennifer Shyue has furnished an English translation of The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu that conveys the resonant darkness lurking behind the placid surface of Higa Oshiro’s writing. The experience is akin to wandering the dusty, hilly streets of Lima, making discoveries as exciting as they are tinged with melancholy.”
—Alex Lanz, Full Stop
“Translated into gorgeously flowing English by Jennifer Shyue, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu follows Katzuo as he pays final respects to family and friends and revisits sites of painful and sublime memory. As he unravels, the brutal history of his family’s immigration is revealed to him anew in the burdensome ‘enlightenment’ of the story’s title.”
—Diane Josefowicz, SUSPECT (Singapore Unbound)
“Shyue has managed to keep an impressive amount of the tone and voice—the feel—of the original in her translation. Peru is very much in the Americas: readers who thought they had a grasp of the range and breadth of Asian-American fiction, might just here find some enlightenment of their own.”
—Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books
“Nakamatsu reminds me of Clarice Lispector’s Lóri (An Apprenticeship): both live away from home, and their emotional response to this distance fills them with self-hatred, as well as a metaphysical angst; for a person without a country, the base act of being becomes an intricate task, something that one is conscious of, something that appears teachable.”
—Colm McKenna, Dispatches
“Composed of long, winding sentences, phrase following phrase, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu is beautifully dreamlike, a work of evocative geographical and mental landscapes and of marginal histories made visible and vivid.”
—Marisa Grizenko, Plain Pleasures
“Translator Jennifer Shyue renders Oshiro into an impressively distinctive English. One that is, as she puts it, breathless. Gasping even, during swells of Nakamatsu’s 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. After Enlightenment, the duo’s prose rhythms continue to flicker and rock in the reader’s ear. Not at all an unpleasant voice to have trapped inside your head.”
—Alex Tedesco, Blathering Struldbrugs
“It’s always nice when a book you know little about proves to be just what you need […] With the work marked by lengthy sentences, Higa Oshiro and Shyue demand concentration from the reader, an endeavour that is well worth the effort.”
—Tony’s Reading List
“[E]vocative novella which in this excellent translation from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue draws one right into Nakamatsu’s world, experiencing all those fears, the confusion (the sense of dreaminess and wooziness), the feeling of loss as he unravels. […] This is a beautiful and complex little book.”
—Mallika Ramachandran, Literary Potpourri
“This hypnotic novella moves with a steady, tumbling pace, intensifying as it traces the protagonist’s descent into madness.”
—Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts
“I haven’t read a book that takes words and makes them so damn stunning, whilst simultaneously being one of the most depressing books I’ve read. Not in a long time. Not since Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet.”
—Thomas Goddard, Who Gives a Book
“In Nakamatsu’s pre-spiritual wanderings among the bustling living and dead we get something like a mix of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo and the disintegrative novels of Thomas Bernhard.”
—Evan Dent, Evan Reads
Tags: Augusto Higa Oshiro, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, Spanish, Peru, prose, novel, book, Asian diaspora, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, NPR, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, The Morning Star, World Literature Today, Full Stop, Asian Review of Books, Singapore Unbound, Dispatches, print