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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines Shirin Nezammafi's Salam and Kirino Natsuo's Nichibotsu, showing how both expose the violence of the legal state against “legal outsiders.” Drawing on law and literature, it traces confinement, language, and abjection to reveal contested justice.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines the intersection of confinement and law in two contemporary fictional works— Shirin Nezammafi short story “Salam” (2006) and Kirino Natsuo’s novel Nichibotsu (2020) —as critical interrogations of the tension between human rights, law, and captivity in contemporary Japan. Ultimately, I argue that the stories put the inherently violent project of the nation-state itself on literary trial. In the context of recent revelations regarding miscarriages of justice in the Japanese legal system—whether the death of Wishma Sandamali or the belated release of Iwao Hakamata—I turn to literature to understand where justice can be, or is still being, contested.

As a well-known story of an “illegal” young Hazara migrant, Nezammafi’s “Salam” may at first seem an unlikely pairing with Kirino’s comparatively underexamined, provocative novel Nichibotsu, which stages a fictional literati purge in Japan. The female protagonists of the two texts—an illiterate young migrant and a professional Japanese novelist—could not, on the surface, be more dissimilar in their positioning within the Japanese nation-state. Yet what the stories share is a stark account of the violence exercised by the legal state apparatus against those it renders “legal outsiders,” revealing a common concern with regimes of legal exclusion.

Drawing on the frameworks of law and literature and global carceral studies, this presentation explores how each text constructs and interrogates legal outsiderhood to expose the coercive mechanisms through which the modern state defines, disciplines, and expels subjects. By tracing narrative depictions of spatial closure, breakdown of language, and abjection, I demonstrate how these stories intervene on behalf of those denied agency and access to law. .