News Details Page

Mr. Junot Diaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1968, received BA from Rutgers University and MFA from Cornell University. He published the first collection of stories Drown in 1995, whose title story is included in Norton Anthology of American Literature,  the most prestigious literary anthology in the United States. Thus, Mr. Diaz is already canonized in American Literary History. Currently he is teaching creative writing at MIT as the Rudge and Nancy Allen professor of writing.

I first came to know the name of Junot Diaz, a young promising Dominican American writer, when someone recommended to me his highly acclaimed novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2007), the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. This novel immediately fascinated me, because despite the author’s Latin American background, his created young overweight nerd Oscar Wao, a typical “Otaku” in Japanese, so deeply imbibed the subcultural fruits of postmodern Japan in the fields of popular fiction, manga, anime and gaming. The name of the hero is a nickname, for his overweight figure resembles the Irish canonical writer Oscar Wilde. Nonetheless, while his archetype Oscar Wilde stated in 1889, more than 135 years ago that “In fact the whole Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people,” Oscar Wao himself believes inJapan and its culture limitlessly. Thus, this novel skillfully transgressedthe traditional horizon of expectation of Latin American Magic Realism as cultivated by Jorges Luis Borges, Jose Donoso, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, Reinaldo Arenas, and others. While his literary precursors made every effort to resurrect their indigenous culture by re-appropriating American modernist William Faulkner, the 1949 Nobel Laureate in Literature and the champion of postbellum Southern literature in the United States, Diaz attempted to reorganize Latin American popular culture in the context of Japanese pop culture. 

The year 2007 coincided with my growing interest in the concept of “Planetarity” as proposed by Gayatri Spivak, the Indian American scholar critic whose works had long supported the idea of postcolonialism as of the 1980s. In the wake of 9.11 terrorist attacks, she states:” I propose the planet to overwrite the globe.  Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere. The globe is on our computers.  No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it.  

The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan” (Spivak, Death of a Discipline [New York: Columbia UP, 2003], 72&81). Here Spivak radically displaces the concept of Globalization as another name of Americanization with her concept of Planetarity that transcends the limit of Americanization.

Therefore, when Japan suffered from the Eastern Japan multiple disasters on March 11, 2011, Junot Diaz’s essay published immediately after the tragedy seemed to me his confession of planetarylove of the metropolis of this Far East country:

“Cities produce love and yet feel none.  A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting.  Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable.  No city in the world makes that vulnerability more explicit than Tokyo.  In the last century alone Tokyo was destroyed two times.  Once by the Great Kanto Earthquake and again by the bombings of World War II.

Each time Tokyo has risen anew.

Today, as radiation from the Fukushima daiichi Nuclear Power Station drifts toward Tokyo, I am again thinking about the vulnerability of cities and of our love for them” (“Junot Diaz savors insane urbanism, costume tribes, and salsa in Roppongi” (Newsweek[March 28 & April4, 2011]: 76)

The author’s originality lies in refreshing Latin American Magic Realism with what could well be called the nuclear imagination permeating and even controlling the narrative of Oscar Wao. The hero envisions the future in which he will survive the post-apocalyptic world together with his girlfriend.

What is more, we cannot neglect the hero’s enduring obsession with the film Virus based upon the original novel by Komatsu Sakyo in 1964.

At night, unable to sleep, he watched a lot of bad TV, became obsessed with two movies in particular: Zardoz which he’d seen with his uncle before they put him away for the second time) and Virus(the Japanese end-of-the-world movie with the hot chick from Romeo and Juliet).  Virus especially he could not watch to the end without crying, the Japanese hero arriving at the South Pole base, having walked from Washington D.C., down the whole spine of the Andes, for the woman of his dreams. (Oscar Wao, 33).

Since I was first introduced to Junot Diaz and his wife Marjorie Lieu almost ten years ago at Keio University by our common friend Professor Yuko Matsukawa of Seijo University, I and Junot have consistently discussed the significance of the movie Virus . The reason is very simple. Whenever and wherever apocalyptic disasters storm the world, whether natural or artificial, the original novel Virus: The Resurrection Day and its movie version get revived, preparing the way for the brand-new idea of what Timothy Snyder called “Sadopopulism” in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom (Tim Duggan Books) . Now itis interesting to note that while the author of Virus: The Resurrection Day Komatsu Sakyo shared his enthusiastic appreciation of William Faulkner with numerous Latin American writers in the 1950s, it is a Latino American young writer who has since the 1980s been so radically moved by the film Virus as to incorporate it into his Pulitzer winning novel Oscar Wao and start writing a new novel based upon the logic of Sadopopulism. In this context, Mr. Junot Diaz deserves the name of literary prophet of Triculture.