NAKAGAMI KENJI

   Nakagami Kenji was a writer, critic, and poet of burakumin ancestry who wrote his first novels while working manual labor at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. Nakagami won the Akutagawa Ryunosuke Prize for Misaki (1975; tr. The Cape, 1999), but died early from kidney cancer at the age of 46.

   See also POETRY.