Nakagami Kenji is said to be a novelist who often utilized the alley (“roji”) in his novels. His concept of “roji” was initially associated with the Hisabetsu Buraku (an area where descendants of the lowest social class in the feudal system live together) of his home town, the Kumano District of Kishu (the name of a feudal domain, currently known as Wakayama Prefecture). His novels after “The End of the Earth, Time of Supremacy (Chi-no-Hate, Shijo-no-Toki)” which is a story about the break-up of a “roji”，have been regarded as literary works about “Diaspora”，which is a theme peculiar to Asia. While not wholly neglecting the later novels with Asian themes, critical studies of Nakagami’s works have nevertheless failed to discuss fully the importance of these later works.
Since the latter half of the 1970s, Nakagami Kenji began to go abroad frequently. The fact that his experiences of different cultures, mainly Korean, exerted a great influence on his understanding of history and on his novels has not been discussed much. As Nakagami Kenji geographically expanded to Asia the concept of “roji”， which was previously limited to his hometown of Kumano in Kisyu, various important problems concerning the spacial representation of alien cultures arose. This is all the more so, because the representation of Asia in contemporary literature cannot be seen as separated from the history of Japan’s imperialistic rule of her colonies and the Great East Asian and Pacific War.
In this paper, Nakagami Kenji’s experiences in Korea and his construction of space in his later novels will be discussed in relation to his view of Asia and his understanding of its history.
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