The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro

Author:Augusto Higa Oshiro [Oshiro, Augusto Higa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

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For days afterward, for weeks even, Nakamatsu wandered the streets around Bausate y Meza and Parque El Porvenir in bewilderment, a wraithlike being, cheeks pale, lips pursed, chin tipped down, showing off his useless hat, his unsteady cane, his vintage jacket. There they all were, the chipped street corners, the scrap merchants swarming with their tricycle carts, and that spill of working-class faces, small windows, power lines, and rag merchants with their junk, while he, Katzuo, walked, solemn, swaying absurdly in the heat, exactly as if in a reverie, pondering these voices from the past. That sobbing, mumbling, growling reminded him of his turbid childhood, when his head had been full of those wraithlike old Japanese, and even with his eyes open, completely awake, Katzuo saw, in the barges at port, in the hills, behind the gullies, in the hard earth of the cotton plantations, feverish Japanese laborers bustling on the patios of their quarters among chickens and guinea pigs. It wasn’t him, it was a whirlwind of corrupted voices, chimerical scenes, unreal images that came and went, carving swirls and squalls into the imagination and the heart, whether in the mornings as he wrote his novel about the unfathomable Etsuko Untén, or during his afternoon strolls on some street in San Luis, or perhaps at the internet cafés where he listened to zarzuelas. And all the while, Katzuo asked himself in his anguish: Who were they? Did they perhaps come from one of death’s zones? Why had they burst into his head as winding stories and murmurs? He truly could not explain it, and paced from the living room to the bedroom, through the kitchen, sighing by the air shaft, talking to himself, grinding his teeth, hands behind his back, smoking incessantly, glimpsing the confusion his life had turned into. Was he a madman? Was he raving? Who was he? Maybe a dark and deadly being had taken over his body? And as his brain spun with immense celestial questions, for measureless days he forgot to eat, shave, bathe. Nevertheless, when his confusion lifted and he had days at peace, and he went out for his afternoon strolls, one of those nights when he found himself at his desk, looking at the shelves of books, absorbed in the flow of his consciousness, nothing on his mind, feeling nothing, in the depths of emptiness, once again his musical birds came back: those trills, that picturesque chirping filling his bedroom with a taste of cliffs, the babbling creek, the scent of oregano and lúcuma fruit fumes, the grasses of the meadow. And like always, Katzuo gazed rapturously in the air, and continued to be astonished, with an astonishment that was almost bliss, since this was a snippet of nature in all its splendor. The peculiar thing this time was that amid the foliage were the voices of his forebears, that chorus of faraway words, those cries that earlier had emerged from the blooming ceibos: “For the Japanese there was

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