But how alienating his boardinghouse-to-boardinghouse mode, his inability to settle on an ‘occupation’—a name of what he ‘was.’ What use he provided. How the nail was his mom dying. How when that happened, shit went way left. But you still have yours—

“So this guy, ‘Karl Ove,’ he doin this thing where he sorta writing unabashedly about himself, his deepest secrets. His shameful memories/feelings. The effect of reading it feels calming for me. Seeing someone else doing that. Someone not scared to.”

My mama got quiet when I said that last part. Her body did.

Looking out at the ocean, the sky, the stars.

She didn’t say anything immediately.

Like she’d been fully feeling these things already, or already had these feeling-ideas stashed. Dormant. Like what I’d said didn’t communicate anything in words, only nudged their activation.

Once she spoke, she pointed out that Murakami’s protagonists sorta did that. Divulged their secrets. Their shameful, taboo feelings/thoughts/impulses.

Why Murakami’s societal rep was having ‘weird/funny cringey-but-satisfying-somehow sexual elements’ in all his novels.

“That’s true!” I said, feeling that.

“Sounds like shishosetsu,” she said.

“Come again?”

“Murakami is known for his American influences, like The Great Gatsby, but he’s also part of the shishosetsu tradition. The I-novel.”

The I-novel, my mama explained, was a Japanese literary genre dating back to the turn of the century. To the Meiji era.

A type of confessional literature where the events of the story corresponded to the events in the author’s life. Meant to expose the ‘dark side’ of society / the author’s life. Its foremost formal requirement being that it was written in the first person. An early attempt for Japanese writers to strive for a more Western form of individualism and authenticity.

“Early examples concerned the burakumin.”

“Burakumin?” I said, leaning forward so my exhaled smoke wouldn’t hit her. Ashamed to be smoking in front of her but trusting she’d understand. Doing what I could to not fuck up her shit by doing it, if I was gonna do it.

The burakumin were, literally, ‘hamlet/village people.’

An outcast group, lowest on the social rungs.

Discriminated against and ostracized, relegated to impure jobs tainted by death.

Executioners, undertakers, slaughterhouse workers.

Tanners.

Like Kenji Nakagami, who dropped The Cape (1976) when my mama was in her twenties, and who was the first/only post-war writer to publicly identify himself as being born into the burakumin.

And the wild thing about him and a lot of burakumin was that they were born illegitimately, since if a dude wasn’t burakumin but banged a burakumin, he’d bounce and the child would be born not only fatherless but nameless.

Without a name, one wasn’t, technically, a person.

Not without papers.

Wasn’t recognized in the system.

“Goddamn,” I said, stubbing out my cig in the sand and coughing. Inhaling my lungs full of air.