Steeped in the narrator's grief ... The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu qualifies in only the barest sense as realism. It never quite departs what we know to be possible, but a sad magic pervades it anyway.
Oshiro manages to expose decades of invisible history, including the U.S.-initiated deportation of Japanese Peruvians to U.S. prison camps during WWII. Talented polyglot Shyue enables Oshiro’s debut in English, rendering Oshiro’s dense, lyrical prose into a resonating anti-bildungsroman of a man’s dissolution.
Oshiro explores issues of grief, ethnic identity, and aging in his feverish English-language debut ... The prose itself is dreamlike, with long complex sentences evoking a lush garden.
