The literature of the echoing chamber [electronic resource] : Nakagami Kenji and the theory of the utsuho
Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Abstract The present thesis proposes a new way of reading the modern Japanese writer Nakagami Kenji's fictions by identifying the use of a theory in his creation of the works. The theory was for the first time proposed by the author himself in an April 1978 public lecture, and he called it the theory of the _utsuho_ (hollow, vacancy). The utsuho is a psychological emptiness that works in generating a primordial form of vibrations that inspires the generation of the sound of music as well as linguistic discourses. According to this theory, the _utsuho_ not only can be internalized in each individual person (within the characters in his fictions as well as the author himself) but also can be identified with the entire community of the segregated ghetto where the author grew up -- Nakagami had a minority background as a _buraku-min_, and in fictional works, he called it the _roji_ alleyway. In other words, the _utsuho_ functioned as an affective acoustic sphere that nurtured Nakagami as a storyteller, while it also served as a locus for artistic production. The acoustic and oral aspects of the _utsuho_ as the origin of the author's narratives characterize Nakagami's fictional works. It serves as a conduit that connects between a noisy urban jazz café in Tokyo with a small community in Wakayama; it is a hollow on the back of a female character, a trace of lung surgery, that generates emotionally-loaded stories; and it provides a locus for transforming a form of music into a literary text. The present thesis takes examples from Nakagami's fictional works to illustrate the functions of the theory of the _utsuho_. Nakagami's self-recognized indebtedness to various forms of music and oral traditions of performative narratives in East Asia (including Japan and Korea) can be explicated in the perspective of the theory of the _utsuho_. Jazz, reggae, classical music (especially, J. S. Bach), and _sekkyō-bushi_ provided, for Nakagami, sources for initiating the primordial vibrations that resonated in the imaginary acoustic sphere of the _utsuho_, generating narrative discourses. The present thesis illustrates the way some repetitious elements in musical pieces that Nakagami has referred to have been transformed and incorporated into his artistic writings. The narratives that Nakagami's mother Chisato told him as a child (including the _sekkyō-bushi_ she herself heard as a child) were rediscovered in the sphere of the utsuho and reconstructed into a larger form of literary texts. Such origins do not contradict the fact that Nakagami eventually produced literary texts loaded with maternal (and feminine) elements. With the use of the theory of the _utsuho_, a locus of minute transformation, the sense of abjection (Julia Kristeva), often associated with the voices of aged women singers and the manifestation of human frailty (especially that of women), paradoxically endowed the texture of Nakagami's fictions with the timbre of the sublime. With the theory of the _utsuho_ in mind, Nakagami in a way depoliticized and dehistoricized his own minority identity and reconstructed acoustic resources into aesthetic products. However, if one reminds him or herself of the origin of the _utsuho_ that the author identifies with the segregated ghetto, they can recognize the historicity of the concept, loaded with human agony and precariousness. Nakagami's literature essentially holds such a circulatory loop between aesthetics and politics, in its entirety constituting a powerful movement of performativity.