Narrating Japanese Immigration to Brazil: From Modernist Stereotypes to Familial Tales

Although Japanese Brazilians have constituted a key immigrant group since their arrival in 1908, the community has been relatively underrepresented in Brazilian literature. Given the linguistic and often physical isolation of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, their literary portraits have differed from representations of prominent European immigrant groups, which have historically been more fully realized. Japanese characters initially appeared as caricatures of urban types in works by Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade in the 1920s and 1930s. Narratives by Japanese Brazilians, specifically Ryoki Inoue’s Saga (2006) and Oscar Nakasato’s Nihonjin (2011), correct for the oversights of earlier depictions by focusing on familial tales of migration and labor that foreground life on rural coffee fazendas. This article analyzes these nuanced portraits in contrast to the one-dimensional modernist accounts to underscore the critical place of diasporic voices in a reimagined Brazilian literary canon.