I’m haunted by one character in Mario Vargas Llosa's The Green House. He's known by the name Fushía – which could come from the Japanese surname Fujiya; he is often addressed by the nickname Japonito – the little Jap. (The English translation opts for Jappy – not a word I’ve ever heard.) He's wandered over the border from Brazil into Peru after a violent gaol-break: ‘Do you know that I sent them to the hospital? The newspapers talked about Japanese cruelty, … Oriental vengeance’. He will become a pirate, organising one group of native jungle ‘indios’ to prey on others and steal their hard-won rubber harvest. By the end of the novel, he is back in the jungle, ravaged by leprosy, a ‘small pile of living and bloody flesh’ (Vargas Llosa, p. 368).

Given the fact that Brazil and Peru were the two countries in South America which attracted the largest number of Japanese migrants from the late-nineteenth century to the first four decades of the twentieth, there is nothing surprising about a Japanese character popping up in South American writing. Observers of the political scene in Peru might even allow themselves the mildly Borgesian fantasy – in fact, I doubt they could resist it – of seeing in ‘el Japonito’ a cruel prefiguring of Vargas Llosa's political nemesis, Peruvian patriot, globe-trotting born-again Japanese citizen, Alberto Fujimori.

My own fantasy is more literary, if still Borgesian. My Fushía, or Fujiya, has wandered into Vargas Llosa's novelistic jungle of circa 1965 from a book by Nakagami Kenji.