Gregory Khezrnejat, tall and slight with a neatly trimmed graying beard, sits in front of me in a cafe in the heart of Tokyo’s bustling Shibuya Ward. Accents play a strong role in his short story “Kaikonchi,” up for an Akutagawa Prize this week, so I come primed for a full South Carolinian twang. But if Khezrnejat has a Southern accent, it’s barely detectable, though it’s also hard to hear his soft voice clearly above the river of chatter around us.

In “Kaikonchi,” or “A Clearing,” written by the 39-year-old American in Japanese, the main character, Russell Shirazi, finds himself lost in a wash of poignant confusion when he hears a song in Farsi. He doesn’t know anything of the language, but he can still feel a sense of sorrow in the music. I wonder if that feeling is how Khezrnejat, an academic and writer, felt when he first came to Japan in 2000: on the pleasant side of disoriented.

Khezrnejat was born in 1984 in Greenville, South Carolina. His mother remarried when he was young, so his surname is Persian from his father, though he’s not ethnically Iranian. When Khezrnejat was older, he wondered what it was like for his father to raise a child in his second language. That kernel became the basis for “Kaikonchi,” his fourth published work of fiction.

In the 1990s, Khezrnejat says, Greenville was trying to attract Japanese investment to the city, and so along with Spanish and Russian, his high school also offered Japanese language classes. Intrigued not by economic possibility but rather the unfamiliarity of the writing system, Khezrnejat made his choice. The first time he left the United States was at the age of 16, on a class trip to Japan.

At Clemson University in South Carolina, he completed a dual degree in computer science and literature (“They both make you think about how information is expressed and organized, what's the connection between a signifier and the signified,” he says), and then returned to Japan, this time to the countryside outside of Kyoto as an English teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme. Ten years later, Khezrnejat found himself still in Japan, now with a Ph.D. in Japanese literature. During this time he started journaling and blogging about his experiences on social networking site Mixi as a way of improving his written Japanese.

Khezrnejat never expected to make a living as a full-time writer (nor does he currently; he’s a literature professor at Hosei University in Tokyo). But what had started as a hobby paid off: In 2021, Khezrnejat’s debut story, “Kamogawa Runner,” a second-person narrative about a young man who moves to Kyoto from abroad, won two Kyoto Literature Awards, both the general prize and the award for overseas writers.

Then last month, “Kaikonchi” was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, the winner for which will be announced this Thursday. Non-native Japanese speaking recipients of the literary prize, which is awarded twice a year, have been relatively few: The first was Yang Yi, born in China, who won in 2008, and most recently, Li Kotomi of Taiwan won in 2021. Khezrnejat would be the first ever winner from the United States since the prize was launched in 1935, should he win.

At a time in which just the tiniest whiff of cultural appropriation can turn Twitter into a veritable combat zone, it might seem like an odd choice for a white American man from South Carolina to be publishing fiction in Japanese. And it might further seem strange that an American should win a Japanese literary prize when there are plenty of book awards already out there for Western writers. But Khezrnejat sees it quite differently: In his view, writing in Japanese is his own minor rebellion against the global hegemony, arrogance even, of his native English.

“I've always been uncomfortable with self-satisfied communities of language and culture that are very sure of their own, not even correctness, but their own universalism,” he says. “I come from a small town that is fairly conservative. And that sort of complete isolationism, that complete self-centeredness — I think it's really dangerous.”

At the same time, Khezrnejat sees his choice to write in Japanese as a small defiance to stereotypes in his own home of Japan. He finds that the role of a typically white Westerner in Japanese culture, as often seen in entertainment, problematic: “When non-Japanese characters appear, they're not human beings, they're symbols of difference or a foreign culture. They act as this signifier: ‘You are now in a fantasyland,’ ‘You’re now outside of daily life.’”

He hopes his stories offer a challenge to this fetishization of foreigners. His characters encounter many of the familiar problems and questions of life as outsiders in Japan, all while speaking and thinking in Japanese.

Khezrnejat himself thinks in both languages, and doesn’t seem especially daunted by the task of writing in his adopted one. In fact, he resists the idea that all literature ought to sound like pitch-perfect naturally spoken language. “There are Japanese writers who are consciously trying to break the hold that the language has on them as a native speaker — which is probably the responsibility of any writer,” he says. “So they write maybe in a stilted way, or in a way that doesn't sound totally natural. I don’t think it’s that clear cut.”

Indeed: The goal of the Japanese language student is to mimic native speakers; the goal of the Japanese literary writer is to break the form.

Though Khezrnejat’s experiences will be familiar to a small minority of people, he sees his voice as one among many enriching the landscape of contemporary Japanese literature. In Japan, as elsewhere, literary writers have become gradually more diverse over time: First mostly wealthy educated men, then writers from lower classes, then more female writers, then ethnic minorities living in Japan, then an increase in immigrant literature. Khezrnejat’s own works are often marketed as ekkyō bungaku, or “transborder literature,” although he seems ambivalent about the label.

In “Kaikonchi,” which draws on Khezrnejat’s own life, Russell is in his late 20s and back from Tokyo to visit his father in South Carolina. Russell’s father, like the author’s, is Persian and not his biological father. Russell’s mother has left them. The story’s timeline shifts between past and present, a disorientation aided by Russell’s jet lag.

In one scene from his childhood, Russell asks his father to teach him Farsi, and after a moment, he replies, “What for?” He goes on to say that Russell already knows English, which means he can go anywhere, that he’s free. The elder Shirazi, on the other hand, who left Iran as a young man, stumbles through daily conversations in South Carolina.

Russell is quiet. His mother tongue, the Southern accent of his mother, is a cage, he thinks, which he associates with his parents fighting and the parent who abandoned him. And because English is his first language, he can never escape the responsibility of understanding; even the stray conversations of strangers wend their way into his mind. Later he learns Japanese not for any professional opportunity, but as an intellectual challenge. And when he lives in Tokyo, even at his Japanese level, he has the chance to tune out his adopted language.

The story, and Khezrnejat’s own personal journey as a student and a writer, offer a shifting prism on language, which is not just a way of communicating. Depending on who is speaking, listening and learning, it can be: a puzzle, an identity, a form of power, an economic means, a vehicle for memory, even an escape.