ABSTRACT
“[M]y reading public is usually academic. Unfortunately, that’s how it is,” says Augusto Higa Oshiro, the author of Gaijin (Extranjero) (2014). 1 While he tried to publish the novel with Alfaguara, a leading Spanish-language publishing house, which can reach massive numbers of potential readers in the Spanish-speaking world, he is aware that he does not write for a mass audience. According to Higa, the problems that he intends to expose in his works and his “afflicted prose” (“la prosa castigada”) do not attract the masses. At first glance, the author’s awareness that his audience is limited to academics and that his “afflicted prose” is perhaps inaccessible for general public, seems to suggest that Gaijin should be read, not as a form of popular culture, but rather as a literary work of high culture mainly for critics in academia.
