[Essay][Literature] Following Kafka (7) The Wolf-Sickness Man Atsushi Nakajima and Kafka: Reading "The Burrow"

This is the opening of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari's famous essay on Franz Kafka, "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature." They superimpose the image of the "rhizome"—a fluid network that continues to connect and change freely, denying fixed, tree-like systems based on centers and hierarchies, which is a keyword of their own philosophy and a buzzword in contemporary thought—onto Kafka's late short story "The Burrow" (Der Bau). One can enter from any hole, and inside, labyrinthine underground passages are continuously dug in every direction, expanding endlessly. Indeed, the world of the burrow depicted by Kafka is rhizomatic.

As for that "Burrow," what kind of novel is it? Like many of Kafka's works, it is elusive, lacks a discernible plot, and is quite difficult to explain.

I quote this because Atsushi Nakajima (1909–1942) summarizes it accurately and concisely. This "strange novel" called "The Burrow" refers to Kafka's "The Burrow," and since "Roshitsuki" was written in 1936, this is a very early introduction to Kafka, even on a global scale. There were no translations yet, and it is said that Atsushi Nakajima read Kafka in English translation.
"Roshitsuki" is a personal-novel-style short story based on Nakajima's own experiences, with a high school teacher in Yokohama as the protagonist, and it belongs to the same series as "Chameleon Diary." With daily trivialities as the background, it depicts inner conflict caused by excessive self-consciousness. When I first read it, my impression was that it lacked structure and development, making it hard to call it a first-class work among Nakajima's pieces, and I could not understand why he suddenly mentioned Kafka.
I lacked the necessary education.

This is a quote from Mencius used as an epigraph for "Roshitsuki," which roughly means, "A pathological perversion where one is so preoccupied with a single finger that one loses one's shoulders and back; such a person is called a man of wolf-sickness." Tracing the positioning of this term "wolf-sickness" (roshitsu) as an important word for understanding the author seems to go back to Taijun Takeda (1912–1976).

The conflict between literature and life, and life being蚕食 (eaten away) by literature. Regarding "Roshitsuki," Taijun Takeda even commented, "The Shiina Rinzo-esque darkness is already abundantly and beautifully stored here with a Kajii Motojiro-esque delicacy." Incidentally, "pre-war writer" Atsushi Nakajima and "post-war writer" Taijun Takeda were, surprisingly, of the same generation, only three years apart.

The detailed biography of Atsushi Nakajima, which can be called the definitive edition, "Roshitsu Seiden: Nakajima Atsushi no Bungaku to Shogai" (The True Biography of Wolf-Sickness: The Literature and Life of Atsushi Nakajima) by Minato Kawamura, as the title suggests, captures the word "wolf-sickness" broadly as a basso continuo-like sense of existence for Atsushi Nakajima, and develops literary and work criticism as if varying a theme. It is a stimulating study. If I were to rephrase it in my own way, it would be as follows: a spiral of existential anxiety toward the groundlessness and purposelessness of being alive, the vivid reality of life alienated by excessive skepticism toward the meaning of existence, and the structure of life where the physical reality is consumed by metaphysical introspection—.

Yes, "wolf-sickness" is clearly also the theme of "The Burrow," and furthermore, could one not interpret it broadly to say that this word illuminates the core of the Kafkaesque world?

The story begins with an opening that doesn't seem like an opening, but it is a dead end from the start. As I read on, it begins to feel like a beginning no matter where I read from. The first-person protagonist, a "mysterious small animal," keeps digging holes solely to protect itself from enemies, but the seeds of worry never end. The introspection regarding safety that the protagonist obsessively repeats is homologous to the strange expansion of the burrow he creates, like a mirror image of each other. And the mysterious "hissing" sound that amplifies the protagonist's anxiety.
"...I listened, but there was no change, and besides." The story ends abruptly, or rather, as usual, it is unfinished, but that conversely creates a nightmarish lingering effect, as if intended, that the hole-digging and the monologue of "I=ich" might continue forever. An infinite loop of a dark burrow and a dark ego—.

In the aforementioned work, Deleuze and Guattari, following Kafka, propose the concept of "minor literature." Its characteristics can be summarized in the following three points.
1. The use of a minority language within a dominant major language. That is, the use of an artificial German within the Jewish community of Prague against standard German. 2. The immediate politicization of the personal. That is, conflicts within the family are directly linked to political issues such as bureaucracy and power. 3. A collective apparatus of utterance. That is, literature is not an individual monologue, but speaks for the voices of oppressed peoples and groups.
Honestly, I have some trouble understanding the central theme that Kafka's literature equals a "machine," and I am not particularly interested in it, but considering that this definition of minor literature is a work from half a century ago, I think it shows tremendous foresight. Especially when looking at the trends of recent Nobel Prize in Literature winners, one could say that it has become mainstream rather than minor.

Although far cruder and lacking in utility, I have my own definition of minor literature. Being essentially a short story writer, the fact that when one edits their collected works, they fit into at most one to three volumes, which means they likely died young without waiting for maturity, yet despite that, they give a sense of completeness, and so on. Even for a novelist, it seems one can use the term "minor poet," but I likely have in mind the two great minor poets in our country's literary history: Motojiro Kajii (1901–1932) and Atsushi Nakajima. If I look toward world literature, the first person who comes to mind is the Russian genius Garshin (1855–1888) of "The Red Flower" fame.
It is said that before his death, Atsushi Nakajima had his trusted younger sister burn his drafts. This reminds one of the well-known episode where Kafka requested his close friend Max Brod to burn the manuscripts he left behind. One could say they share an extraordinary strictness regarding the perfection of their own work, and a strong self-confidence in their own nature that contradicts that.
"Of all the books I have written so far, the only ones that can remain are 'The Judgment,' 'The Stoker,' 'The Metamorphosis,' 'In the Penal Colony,' 'A Country Doctor,' and the story 'A Hunger Artist.' ... Everything else I have written (what was published in magazines, what is in manuscript form, and also letters) must be burned without a single exception, as far as you can reach ... all of it." This practical will of Kafka was "betrayed" by Max Brod, who believed in the potential of Kafka's literature even more than Kafka himself, but if he had faithfully carried out his friend's dying wish, Kafka would have been what I call a minor writer. Even if the three great unfinished novels with their inexhaustible charm ("The Man Who Disappeared," "The Trial," "The Castle"), the letters that are like labyrinthine novels themselves, and the diaries that have the air of philosophical aphorism collections did not exist, Kafka would still have earned a unique and honorable position in literary history. Even if he had not become the champion of 20th-century literature.
The aspiring writer, who was exceptionally talented but continued to languish as a girls' school teacher, felt a special affinity for the salaryman writer who lamented his misfortune in a distant foreign land; I think that can be read from the passage quoted earlier. A closeness in their qualities as a "man of wolf-like temperament." I do not think he even harbored a shred of a dream that after his death, he would become a nationally popular writer whose work would be in textbooks and who would even be the protagonist of an anime, or that the man who was like a "badger" from the same hole, who "only wrote strange novels" and whose full scope was not yet known at the time, would be celebrated in the future as a great writer representing modern literature—but in any case, a fragment of a dream was fulfilled—Long live minor literature!

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