For those of you interested in such things, my review of Eve Zimmerman's Out of the Alleyway:  Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction (2007) has just appeared in the latest issue of Monumenta Nipponica (Vol. 63, No. 2, Summer 2008).  The first book-length study we have on Nakagami, perhaps the most important Japanese novelist of the past thirty years, Out of the Alleyway covers both his larger-than-life personal image and his remarkably complex fiction and essays.

   My review is quite favorable, I think.  I conclude:

We shouldn’t narrativize Nakagami, forcing his ambiguously shaped peg into one of the round or square holes of modern Japanese literary history. What makes his works interesting, after all, is the way they seem to square the circle. Yet like Nakagami himself, we can’t help but tinker around with the toolbox of myths and histories we have inherited, tacking on new endings and refracting old voices to see what they might render possible. It’s how we try to shake things up. Zimmerman’s elegant book is the first in English on Nakagami, but it won’t be the last. The fascination of his narrative experiments will continue to capture us, and, as he knew better than anyone, no one ever really gets the last word.

The review is available on-line now at the Monumenta Nipponica page on Project Muse.  I'm told it will also appear in abridged form a few weeks from now in the Japan Times.