From "Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction" — Web Exclusive
By Mario Bellatin
Translated by David Shook
Mexican writer Mario Bellatin ranks among the world’s most eclectic, both in his writing and in his personality. Born without a right hand—though he normally wears an imaginative hook from his collection of a dozen—he’s forced to “write with his entire body.” Bellatin studied film in Cuba and theology in Peru, where he was born, and their influence features prominently in his work, often compared to the short films of David Lynch and David Cronenberg. Several of his novellas have appeared in English, including Beauty Salon (City Lights), in Kurt Hollander’s translation, and Chinese Checkers (Ravenna Press), in Cooper Renner’s translation, which collects three important novellas, including Hero Dogs. Bellatin is published widely throughout Latin America and Europe by major presses and cartoneras alike, and his next two books are under contract to appear in French translation before they are published in Spanish.
The following is an excerpt from his highly stylized biography of the fictitious Japanese writer Shiki Nagaoka, translated for the first time into English. Nagaoka is considerably under-acknowledged in the English-speaking world, despite his pervasive influence on world literature. This section is taken from the later portion of Bellatin’s biography, and recounts the postwar activity of Nagaoka, who worked by day at a photography supplies kiosk. Phoneme Books will publish Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction on 1 January 2012.
During the postwar years, when people would try anything to forget the horror they had lived through, Shiki Nagaoka entered a new period of output, characterized by its own unique aesthetic. It is in that mode, with Photos and Words, that Shiki Nagaoka constructs what is possibly his most solid work. That book, which was first translated into English by Life in 1953 and into Spanish in 1960 by the publisher Espasa-Calpe, has become for many an anthem for the country’s reconstruction. Through small, quotidian sketches that give the impression of innocently describing a series of situations, Shiki Nagaoka manages to make his humble society universal. When the renowned cinematographer Ozu Kenzo prepared to make his great film Autumn Afternoon, he returned to the aesthetic of that book to recreate, in his own words, the soul of a city. It is important that someone like Ozu Kenzo, perhaps the most personal of cinema directors, admitted such an influence. Really, one must carefully observe the movie to discern which elements of Shiki Nagaoka’s work the director refers to. Although in Autumn Afternoon, to name just one of his films, the director uses the images of the city that he is known to begin and end his works with, he lets his camera linger on aspects of everyday life. These subtle hints are capable of giving the film a deeper meaning. That Ozu Kenzo would announce this in public meant a great headache for Shiki Nagaoka. From that time on he felt that his artistic occupation, in some way, was entwined with that of his contemporaries. He never agreed to see the film, nor did he accept requests for interviews. Shiki Nagaoka continued to dedicate himself solely to attending to his clients at the photography supply kiosk.
* * *
Shiki Nagaoka’s influence extended beyond the borders of his own country. The book Photos and Words made its way around the world. In some parts of Europe it was considered a new way of understanding reality. In others, subversive photographs based on Shiki Nagaoka’s techniques began to appear. In Mexico he influenced, quite extensively, the work of several photographers called “Generation ‘50.” Above all, the book heavily influenced the work of a writer, Juan Rulfo, who found in Shiki Nagaoka’s narrative photos the possibility of continuing the work that he had initiated in his books, granting a special luster to the visual aspects of the worlds represented. In a mailed letter from 1952, to his Peruvian friend and colleague José María Arguedas, he mentions the importance of our writer’s work on his awakening artistic discovery. He also forecasts the forthcoming appearance of an extended and totalizing novel that will definitively consolidate his thinking, but indicates that to achieve it he almost urgently needs the mediation of photography. Perhaps this fact is important: that for many the work of Juan Rulfo is characterized by its minimalism and fragmentation. For his part, José María Arguedas wrote in his posthumous diary: “to be able to see reality modified not only by the lens of the photographer but also by the written word that accompanies those images is a path that infinitely strengthens the narrative possibilities of actual reality.”
* * *
It is interesting to linger on these two authors because, in some manner, both shared Shiki Nagaoka’s pleasure in living their private lives outside the public domain. What’s more, the three creators were in a certain way constructing their own biographies in the books that they wrote. In Juan Rulfo’s case, it is said that he lie in his bed in agony, mumbling about the structure of his unfinished great work. The death José María Arguedas was spectacular; he ended his life after completing the diary of a suicide. Shiki Nagaoka’s death occurred, even more spectacularly, within a tragic sequence of events that upon simple viewing seems not to have anything to do with his work: he was murdered by a pair of drug addicts who wanted to seize his day’s earnings.
* * *
These three writers—Juan Rulfo, José María Arguedas, and Shiki Nagaoka—were in agreement, each one on their respective side, that narrative photography really does set out to establish a new type of medium, alternative to the written word, and that perhaps it would be the form in which the books of the future would be conceived.
* * *
After the translation of Photos and Words, Shiki Nagaoka received a wide range of invitations to address colloquia and congresses in different parts of the world. Still, he was reluctant to abandon for even a single day the surroundings into which he had been born. Shiki Nagaoka lived in a modest bamboo house that had previously belonged to his sister’s late seamstress. It consisted of a single room of two hundred square feet, which he furnished with a futon and a low table where he would spend nearly the whole night writing. In those years he barely slept. At nightfall he lit the small room with petroleum lamps. He had two large notebooks: one where he wrote his works of fiction, and another where he collected his memories. The latter had a drawing of a giant nose on its cover. At the end of his life he embraced the idea that, in reality, the size of his nose had determined his existence. This meditation is found written in the notebook, which his sister jealously guarded and later submitted for publication under the false title Posthumous Diary. That notebook contains discrete episodes of his life considered key to understanding the development of his work to come. For example, as a child he was adored by the artists of the Floating World [Movement] that, on more than one occasion, visited his parents’ house. He still seemed to hear the compliments his family bestowed upon him for his nose, when they lauded him as an example of the nation’s new state of liberty. The artists liked to show his parents, from among their collection of paintings, those that featured foreign persons with uncommon noses. Whenever they did it they always placed the young Nagaoka alongside the works. But immediately upon leaving his house, he noticed that the rest of the world looked down on him. The same thing happened to his deformed servant, from the lowest class. From childhood he intuited that the majority unfortunately considered him a symbol of the terrible times in which they lived.
* * *
In his final years, Shiki Nagaoka wrote a book that is fundamental to many. Unfortunately it doesn’t exist in any known language.
* * *
One of Shiki Nagaoka’s primary personality traits, which the writer himself discovered shortly before dying, is that he was always more receptive to criticism than praise. Perhaps for that reason he never publicly took his writing career seriously. He didn’t want to become an embittered old man, attentive to foreign censure. He always preferred to work eight hours a day attending to his kiosk, and two more taking photographic material to and from the laboratory, to attending the discussions, conferences, and congresses he began to be invited to. Likewise, he escaped the pestering of the press, pretending on more than one occasion to be his own twin brother. At the height of the scheme, even some of the most renowned critics believed in the existence of this brother, whom they ironically considered to be an anomaly, as they couldn’t comprehend that a similarly nosed person could exist. For his own part, Shiki Nagaoka always seemed to feel guilty about the size of his nose. He only listened to those who considered his nose a bad omen. Perhaps that’s why he fell in love with that young servant, fat and deformed, that had a giant mole on her right cheek. Maybe that’s why he took her, again and again, to be photographed together, searching perhaps to merge his defective nose and her repulsive body into a single image. Shiki Nagaoka knew in advance that his affection wouldn’t be returned, so he began to despise the servant, who accompanied her master to the photographic studio only to follow his orders. The servant’s deal with Shiki Nagaoka was strange. It’s implausible that she would exercise the right to treat him so poorly, being of such low social condition. But a detailed analysis of the true structure of the social relations with the aristocratic class at that time reveals it sensible, not only her attitude but also the series of hurtful acts the servant perpetrated against her masters. It was precisely the dark character of this situation that appeared to increase his loving outbursts, which Shiki Nagaoka couldn’t liberate himself from for the rest of his life, despite the constant efforts he made to hide it.
Mario Bellatin is one of contemporary Mexico's most prolific and experimental novelists. Lauded by The New York Times as "one of the leading voices in experimental Spanish-language fiction," his book Beauty Salon was published in Kurt Hollander's English translation by City Lights in 2009.
David Shook is a poet and translator in Los Angeles, where he edits Molossus. His recently published translations include chapbooks from the Isthmus Zapotec of Víctor Terán (Poetry Translation Center) and Portuguese of Oswald de Andrade (Manifestoh!), and his current projects include books by Tedi López Mills and Mario Bellatin.
Original text: Mario Bellatin, Shiki Nagaoka: Una Nariz de Ficcion. Mexico City: Los cien mil libros de Bellatin, 2011.
David Shook's translation of Shiki Nagoka: A Nose for Fiction will be published by Phoneme Books in January 2012.