Second part of the conference given in October 2009 by Dr. Marco Martos during the series of talks for the 110 years of Japanese immigration to Peru, referring to the literary work of José Watanabe and Augusto Higa.
I have known Augusto Higa Oshiro since university; I am older than him, and I have seen him many times in the university hallways. And I was very interested in the group he was part of, which is the Narration group. In that group there were some of those who would later become Peru's most prominent fiction writers. There were Miguel Gutiérrez, Oswaldo Reynoso, Juan Morillo – it seems to me that Eduardo González Viaña was also there at the beginning –; Another who later stopped writing but who was promising was Carlos Ballardo, there were also Gregorio Martínez and Augusto Higa. I'm probably forgetting some names.
I always saw them in a bar, I always saw them talking about literature and drinking little. They sat for hours on end. It seemed like they were wasting their time. In reality they were not losing it, they were preparing the magazine Narration, which was very important in the 70s.
And little by little, each one of them, very slowly, became converted – very slowly in the sense that they did not publish a book every year… I have noticed that Alejandro Romualdo is right when he says “poetry Not for sale". He said that in both senses: in the political sense and in the sense that no one buys poetry. But when narrators sell a lot, they are caught by publishers and begin to offer a novel every two years, and sometimes they get ahead of them. So, when they are overtaken they have to finish the novel; and the novel is no longer always good. They are better, I think, those who do not have that pressure.
None of the members of Narration were captured by the publishers and, therefore, their production has been slower, but they have also been able to prepare their products better. I remember that first book of stories by Augusto, at least it's the first one I read, Que te coma el tigre , from 1978. And that was a book of stories by a Peruvian, by a man from the neighborhood. And “Let the tiger eat you” was a song. The younger ones may remember. One of those songs: “let the tiger eat you, let the tiger eat you.” And that was the year 78.
Then he has La casa de Albaceleste , from the year 87 and the novel from 92, Final del porvenir . Augusto has always been a man of the neighborhood, even until his latest novel, this one that for me is dazzling, The Illumination of Katzuo Nakamatsu , which is from 2008; It is a novel where the marks of the neighborhood are. There has always been an argument about whether or not narrators should mention the places their characters go. Vargas Llosa always does it: his characters go down Porta Street, cross 28 de Julio Avenue, etc., etc. Augusto Higa has that thing too, which is realistic. But those who want to theorize against it sometimes invent, when they write, ghostly cities. There is a narrator who invents a city that does not exist anywhere and then thinks that its structure is in the air.
So I, commenting on this novel by this author, say “but this character puts on a suit and by the simple fact of putting on a suit we already know that he is Peruvian, because no one but the Peruvians say the word suit.” So, a neutral language that puts us anywhere is almost impossible. And well, it is a theoretical discussion. But it means that in Augusto's stories and novels it is always seen that he is a Peruvian, and a neighborhood Peruvian. That's a feature since his first book.
But the other thing that he has been marking, and above all it appears in his last two publications: one anthropological or testimonial, Japan does not give two opportunities and the other, this book The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu , where it is... in the same title it is marked the Japanese origin of the character. This is a name of Japanese origin, that is, there is no doubt, but he wants to mark it in an absolute way.
I believe that Peruvian criticism has passed very quickly on this experience in Augustus' Japan, because it is an individual experience; The testimony is realistic, it has the great reportage that some works that are published in the newspapers have. But there has been no reception, no in-depth commentary on the meaning of this book. And the meaning, he has said in statements: is that Peruvians of Japanese origin discover their Peruvianness precisely when they go to Japan. Going to Japan makes them more Peruvian. So, I would like to know, but I will never be able to know, what happens to those who do adapt, or do they not adapt one hundred percent?
And I am particularly interested in knowing, I don't know if one day someone will write about what happened to Abelardo Takahashi Núñez, the composer from Chiclayo who did go to Japan and stayed there and died in Japan, as I understand it. It would be very interesting to know how…of course he has traveled when he was older; and in any case Augusto had in mind to go and return.
* This article is published thanks to the agreement between the Peruvian Japanese Association (APJ) and the Discover Nikkei Project. Article originally published in Kaikan magazine No. 48, August 2010.
© 2010 Asociación Peruano Japonesa y Marco Martos Carrera / © 2010 Fotos: Asociación Peruano Japonesa. Foto Augusto Higa: Enrique Higa