In many circles of life, enlightenment is an allure, something to work toward, to strive for—as abstract as it may be, it’s an idea many grasp as an appropriate and indeed worthy end goal—the culmination of a soul’s experiences: a sort of freedom achieved after the hard work of human life / lives / living through humanity’s challenges: its heartbreak, its judgements, its harshness, its infighting, the fleetingness of its beauty. 

Yet for Katzuo Nakamatsu, protagonist of Augusto Higa Oshiro’s La Iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu, translated into hypnotic English by Jennifer Shyue in The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, enlightenment shines less like a beacon at the end of his twisted life, and more like the ends of cut wires spinning around, unraveling. When Katzuo, a widowed professor born and raised by Japanese immigrant parents in Lima, Peru, receives a letter stiffly asking him to retire, he sits at his desk to finish a “little unfinished story,” feeling like he’s “finally adequately mature for the task” of writing from his recollections of “his tortured and unruly childhood, when voices and specters had twined in his mind.”

What ensues is not only the story of a nisei—a Japanese term for ‘second generation’ used throughout North and South America to refer to ethnically Japanese children born in a new country to Japanese-born immigrants. It’s also a spiraling story of insanity, as Kazuo reaches back into his past, revisiting, revising his life, his corporeal form loses its connection with his mind:

It’s very likely he roamed through the streets, unembarrassed, unfeeling, through mazes of houses, dense copses of trees, working-class developments, and traffic. When he resurfaced into consciousness, he found himself in his house, sitting at the desk chair, gazing at the bookcase, dissolved and wilted, hands in his lap, not moving his legs, not a single muscle, inhaling and exhaling, not thinking, not feeling, completely static, rocklike, eyes locked on the air. 

Shyue maintains numerous, gorgeous currents of narrative flow, following Katzuo’s descent into madness with melodically long, clause-filled sentences. Working with Oshiro’s decision to slowly reveal the narrator’s identity, Shyue elegantly moves through subtle changes in address that help build tension and drive the simmering plot. Chronicling Katzuo’s mental unravelling serves as a mechanism for peeling off the covers of life’s more protected underbellies: tender heartbreak is shown, generational trauma reconsidered, racism remembered, ageism confronted, isolation impounded. Shyue’s translations of Oshiro’s tumbling, spiraling, rhythmic scenes amplify the sense of unraveling; the enigmatic narrator pulling at, following threads of Katzuo’s life:

Armored inside himself, the patient Katzuo revisited anecdotes from his childhood, a string of voices unraveled into his consciousness, then braced the Star pistol against his temple, exactly the way he wanted, remembering, doubting, step by step, until one clear Tuesday night with a full moon, when the stars were auspicious. …

And how could you not, oh ludicrous Katzuo, starry-eyed with life, mechanical and inscrutable, get into a taxi and arrive ten minutes later at Plaza Ruiz Gallo in Lince, at the ramshackle Midori, the little restaurant stuffed with tables and chairs, the smell of sawdust, customers eating, and there was your friend Juan Miyazaki at the register.

In Shyue’s afterword, she writes the word “breathless” was often evoked during her translation processes, which she started while on a Fulbright in Peru after graduating with an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. “Augusto’s sentences in this novel are elliptical, often anaphoric,” she writes, “building to a swaying rhythm that slips by like silk and is likewise slippery to pin down in a new language.” 

What Shyue pinned down feels snug and, paradoxically, flexible in that story feels deeply particular yet universal, a mix great novels know. When Katzuo takes up the crochet hook to stave off his depression, a hobby he inherited from his wife, he achieves “full arm, finger, eye, and ear synchronization” and becomes “attuned only to the pulsation of his breath,” and this moving meditation—a sense of full presence materializing—is something Shyue also evokes with her translation, drawing readers in with a narrative voice that drowns out the world, deliciously helping us lose track of time.

Not unlike Katzuo’s mind and the novel's narrative enigma, the act of translation is also one that includes unraveling and re-raveling. In an email, Shyue told me she thought of Katzuo’s crafting when she considered this concept. “I've been thinking about ‘originality’ recently for an essay around translation and Augusto that I will probably eventually write, and what I like about translation-as-un/re-raveling too is that it allows for the possibility of "originality" on both sides of the ravel. (No one would accuse a cardigan made from an old pullover unraveled of being less original than its predecessor.)”

Also in her afterword, Shyue considers French translator Lara Vergnaud’s idea that translation is a sensory or kinetic activity—why not consider translation as the movement of unraveling and re-raveling words, sentences, scenes, chapters, novels with great care?

During Shyue’s research in Peru, when she’d meet with Oshiro to talk about his literary works, she also learned about his life growing up as a nisei in the working-class center of Lima. Born in 1946 to immigrants from Okinawa, Oshiro’s own experiences certainly color The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu. Shyue, a Taiwanese American, who also translates Chinese Peruvian poet Julia Wong Kcomt and Russian Cuban poet Anna Lidia Vega Serova, has deeply considered how identity and language intersect in diasporic literatures. The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu exhibits Shyue’s care as much as Katzuo’s lyrical demise:

He allowed himself to flow out of his pores, his belly, his blood, his entrails, unspeaking, unseeing, armless, legless, no memories, no thoughts. There was no space, there was no time; following his hazy course, he managed to snuff out the fatigue, the hunger, the nostalgia, up to that unreal moment, when the afternoon was no longer afternoon, and the evening was not evening, and nothing was not nothing.

Some have compared the novel to Akira Kurasawa’s film Ikiru, as both “emerge from a dark and labyrinthine mindscape, unraveling toward sublime disintegration,” and thanks to Shyue’s translation, the disintegration experienced in English is, indeed, sublime.