BETWEEN SPACES: THE EXPERIENCE OF DISPLACEMENT IN NIHONJIN BY OSCAR NAKASATO

Abstract

Nihonjin, a novel written by Oscar Nakasato, adequately revisits and rebuilds the Japanese immigration in Brazil, an important historical phenomenon that highly contributed to the Brazilian multiculturalism. The story is narrated by the grandson of Hideo, the main character, who is a Japanese immigrant, strict and inflexible, loyal to the emperor, and whose aim is to earn money and go back to Japan. Nonetheless, due to historical, spacial and temporal contingencies, as an exiled, he sees his dreams shattered, through a move that puts the reader in contact with a gamut of information about the expectations, the arrival, the adaptation of the Japanese immigrants in Brazil, the work in the cultivation of land, the difficulty in keeping their own identity when being the ‘other’. From these considerations, the aim of this work is to observe the image of the Japanese immigrant unbared in the text, as well as their discoveries derived from the exile experience and from the historical contingencies that marked the period and reverberated as in the life of the Japanese immigrant (mainly) as in the life of the Brazilian people. We see that the novel presents characters who feel the pain and the hope of leaving their own homeland towards a better future and that, no matter how much they try to keep intact their own identity, even by detachment, they are transformed into and by the relations with Brazilians, reconfigurating and redefining themselves.