Reminiscent of Kurasawa's film Ikiru, Enlightenment explores the
interior mindscape of a Japanese-Peruvian man and his luminous
unraveling
Katzuo Nakamatsu is having a recurring dream. He's strolling down the
glinting avenues of Lima, branches crowning overhead, when he hears
someone snickering from the shadows. He wanders away in concentric
circles, as if along a spider web, and wakes in a sweaty torment.
Nakamatsu sleepwalks his way toward sublime disintegration.
Katzuo is at sea after being forced out of his job as a literature
professor without warning. He retreats into flânerie, musing with
imaginary interlocuters, roaming the streets, and reciting the poems of
Martín Adán. Slowly, to the "steady beat of his reptilian feet,"
Nakamatsu begins to arrange his muted ceremony of farewell. He conjures
his smiling wife Keiko and wonders how he lost his Japanese community
with her death. With a certain electric lunacy, he spruces himself up
with a pinstripe tie, tortoiseshell glasses, and wooden cane, taking on
the costume of a man he knew as a child, hoping to grasp that man's
tenacious Japanese identity.
Like a logic puzzle, Enlightenment calibrates Augusto Higa Oshiro's
own entangled identity. From this dark and deadly estrangement, a
piercing question emerges: "Why did our hides, our Japanese eyes, our
bodily humors, provoke suspicion and rejection?"
