The Closed Hand

Rebecca Riger Tsurumi

Description

In her book, The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature, Rebecca Riger Tsurumi captures the remarkable story behind the changing human landscape in Peru at the end of the nineteenth century when Japanese immigrants established what would become the second largest Japanese community in South America. She analyzes how non-Japanese Peruvian narrators unlock the unspoken attitudes and beliefs about the Japanese held by mainstream Peruvian society, as reflected in works written between 1966 and 2006. Tsurumi explores how these Peruvian literary giants, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Gutiérrez, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Carmen Ollé, Pilar Dughi, and Mario Bellatin, invented Japanese characters whose cultural differences fascinated and confounded their creators. She compares the outsider views of these Peruvian narrators with the insider perceptions of two Japanese Peruvian poets, José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato, who tap personal experiences and memories to create images that define their identities. The book begins with a brief sociohistorical overview of Japan and Peru, describing the conditions in both nations that resulted in Japanese immigration to Peru and concluding in contemporary times. Tsurumi traces the evolution of the terms "Orient" and "Japanese/Oriental" and the depiction of Asians in Modernista poetry and in later works by Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges. She analyzes the images of the Japanese portrayed in individual works of modern Peruvian narrative, comparing them with those created in Japanese Peruvian poetry. The book concludes with an appendix containing excerpts from Tsurumi's interviews and correspondence in Spanish with writers and poets in Lima and Mexico City.
Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: A Socio-historical Overview of the Japanese Presence in Peru

Chapter Two: Images of the Orient/Japan in Spanish American Literature from the Modernistas and Beyond

Chapter Three: A Japanese Swashbuckler in La casa verde and a Japanese Gangster in Travesuras de la niña mala

Chapter Four: Images of the Japanese in Peruvian Short Fiction: “Matavilela” and “Muerte de Sevilla en Madrid”

Chapter Five: Las dos caras del deseo: A Female Nikkei Character in a

Pivotal Role

Chapter Six: Postwar Japanese Literature as a Catalyst for Change in

Puñales escondidos

Chapter Seven: Images of the Japanese in El jardín de la señora Murakami and Shiki Nagaoka: Una nariz de ficción

Chapter Eight: Reflections of the Japanese in the Poetry of José Watanabe

Chapter Nine: Representations of the Okinawan/Japanese in the Poetry of Doris Moromisato

Chapter Ten: Conclusions

Appendix

Interviews with Six Authors

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Latin American
• México
• América del Sur
• South America
• Central America
• SS Central America
• Mexico
• Caribbean

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612492124
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE CLOSED HAND
Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures
Editorial Board
Patricia Hart, Series Editor
Thomas Broden
Elena Coda
Paul B. Dixon
Íñigo Sánchez-Llama
Marcia Stephenson
Allen G. Wood
Howard Mancing, Consulting Editor
Floyd Merrell, Consulting Editor
Susan Y. Clawson, Production Editor
Associate Editors
French
Jeanette Beer
Paul Benhamou
Willard Bohn
Gerard J. Brault
Mary Ann Caws
Glyn P. Norton
Allan H. Pasco
Gerald Prince
Roseann Runte
Ursula Tidd
Italian
Fiora A. Bassanese
Peter Carravetta
Benjamin Lawton
Franco Masciandaro
Anthony Julian Tamburri
Luso-Brazilian
Fred M. Clark
Marta Peixoto
Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg
Spanish and Spanish American
Maryellen Bieder
Catherine Connor
Ivy A. Corfis
Frederick A. de Armas
Edward Friedman
Charles Ganelin
David T. Gies
Roberto González Echevarría
David K. Herzberger
Emily Hicks
Djelal Kadir
Amy Kaminsky
Lucille Kerr
Howard Mancing
Floyd Merrell
Alberto Moreiras
Randolph D. Pope
Francisco Ruiz Ramón
Elżbieta Skl-odowska
Mario Valdés
Howard Young
   volume 54
THE CLOSED HAND
Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature
Rebecca Riger Tsurumi
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright ©2012 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Anita Noble
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tsurumi, Rebecca Riger.
    The closed hand : images of the Japanese in modern Peruvian literature / Rebecca Riger Tsurumi.
        p. cm. — (Purdue studies in romance literatures; 54)
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    ISBN 978-1-55753-607-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-1-61249-213-1 (epdf)— ISBN 978-1-61249-212-4 (epub) 1. Peruvian literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Peruvian literature—21th century—History and criticism. 3. Japanese in literature. I. Title.
    PQ8355.T78 2012
    860.9’985—dc23
2012000419
For Evan, who honors us with his service, and Andrea, who enriches us with her imagination and her artwork
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter One A Socio-historical Overview of the Japanese Presence in Peru
Chapter Two Images of the Orient/Japan in Spanish American Literature from the Modernistas and Beyond
Chapter Three A Japanese Swashbuckler in La casa verde and a Japanese Gangster in Travesuras de la niña mala
Chapter Four Images of the Japanese in Peruvian Short Fiction: “Matavilela” and “Muerte de Sevilla en Madrid”
Chapter Five Las dos caras del deseo : A Female Nikkei Character in a Pivotal Role
Chapter Six Postwar Japanese Literature as a Catalyst for Change in Puñales escondidos
Chapter Seven Images of the Japanese in El jardín de la señora Murakami and Shiki Nagaoka: Una nariz de ficción
Chapter Eight Reflections of the Japanese in the Poetry of José Watanabe
Chapter Nine Representations of the Okinawan/Japanese in the Poetry of Doris Moromisato
Chapter Ten Conclusions
Appendix Interviews with Six Authors
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
 
Years ago when I was a newlywed, my growing curiosity about the differences between my own American and my husband’s Japanese culture led me to take a Japanese classical dance course in Kabuki given by Ito Sachiyo to find out what the Japanese approach could teach me. What I discovered was that the Japanese and Western philosophies of dance movement and style were very different. In Western dance, the goal is to extend the body outward to an imaginary point furthest away with one’s fingers held loosely open. In Japanese classical dance, the dancers hold their bodies erect with their hands setting the boundaries of the inner space with their fingers firmly pressed together. It was this contrast between the tightly closed hands of the Japanese dancer, sealing the boundaries within, and the Western emphasis on extending the body outward to its farthest point, that I recalled when I began to study this theme.
I first learned about the Japanese minority in Peru in a doctoral seminar on the Spanish-American novel and was surprised to discover that little had been written about the image of Peru’s sizeable Japanese minority as it was reflected in modern works of Peruvian literature and poetry. It was Mario Vargas Llosa’s compelling character Fushía, the epitome of the Japanese outsider in La casa verde, that led me to investigate this topic. Through the years, the challenging experience of raising two bicultural children in the US made me wonder how Peruvians perceive minority cultures like the Japanese, and how the Japanese, in turn, see themselves in Peru. While there are many sociological and historical books about the Japanese in Latin America, few literary studies examine the way the Japanese are represented by non-Japanese Peruvian writers as compared to Japanese Peruvian poets.
This book focuses on images of the Japanese created by six non-Japanese Peruvian writers of modern Peruvian literature (novels and short stories) written between 1966 and 2006 that reflect unspoken attitudes toward the Japanese minority. To highlight a critical dimension that is missing from this outsider perspective, I also included works by the two Nisei poets José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato, whose sensitive portraits of their immigrant parents and intense revelations about their own search for identity and struggles to assimilate evoke a more nuanced depiction of the Japanese in Peru. In my references to Japanese authors in this book, I will follow the Japanese custom of using last names first. All references to my personal interviews with the authors under discussion are to the interviews transcribed in the Appendix in the back of this book.
In preparation for the in-depth evaluations of individual works in the chapters that follow, Chapter 1 establishes the socio-historical context in Japan at the close of the nineteenth century when some of its inhabitants emigrated to Peru in pursuit of an economic dream. It goes on to investigate the reception they received in Peru where they initially found work as contract laborers in the coastal cotton and sugar plantations, guano fields, and, later, when they set up businesses and entered the professions in Peru’s major cities. The chapter follows the fate of the Japanese community during the pre–World War II and postwar eras and concludes with conditions in the contemporary period. Chapter 2 traces the evolution of the term Orient throughout history, examines the images of the Japanese/Oriental and Japan in Modernista prose and poetry and later in the works of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges.
Chapter 3 begins the analysis of the individual works of modern Peruvian literature with one of the finest examples of a Japanese protagonist in Peruvian narrative, the character named Fushía, who is the ultimate outsider in Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece, La casa verde . It also examines a Japanese villain named Fukuda and a young female Japanese lawyer named Mitsuko in minor roles in the novelist’s more recent work Travesuras de la niña mala (2006) ( The Bad Girl ). In contrast to Fushía, Fukuda is a one-dimensional Japanese character whose monstrous treatment of Kuriko, the Japanese persona of the “bad girl,” has the effect of creating sympathy for this fickle Peruvian anti-heroine. Mitsuko represents the most modern of the Japanese female characters in the selected Peruvian narrative. A skilled, ambitious lawyer, she discovers that her plan to avoid all relationships that involve emotional attachments in order to pursue a life of pure enjoyment, is not as easy as it appears.
Chapter 4 probes the development of secondary Japanese characters in short fiction in Miguel Gutiérrez Correa’s fragment of a novel “Matavilela” and in Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s short story “Muerte de Sevilla en Madrid.” With “Matavilela,” Gutiérrez began his writing career developing the theme of injustice that would become the linchpin of his work throughout his life. In this short narrative, the novelist re-creates a violent episode from Peruvian history—the 1940 sacking of a Japanese family business in Lima by their Peruvian neighbors, and the arrest of the Japanese immigrants by the local police. The second part of the chapter analyzes Bryce Echenique’s short story “Muerte de Sevilla en Madrid,” in which a Japanese character named Achikawa adopts bizarre anti-social behavior to mask his inability to adapt as an Asian outsider in Madrid where he struggles to communicate with the other members of his group. He strikes up an uneasy friendship with another misfit named Sevilla, the Peruvian protagonist, but is helpless to prevent the final tragedy.
In Chapter 5 , poet Carmen Ollé breaks new ground in her first novel Las dos caras del d