NEW YORK — Just about the time Bliss Broyard's book "One Drop" came out last year, I received the latest book from my prolific friend Inuhiko Yomota, "Japan's Marrano Literature."
In her book, Broyard deals with "racial passing" — a detailed exploration of why her father, the late literary critic for the New York Times Anatole Broyard (1920-1990), refused to tell his children, even in the face of impending death from cancer, that he was partly black.
Yomota's book deals with class and ethnic passing in Japan. To explain marrano (Spanish for "pig") in the title, Yomota, ever up-to-date, begins by questioning Michel Foucault's semiotic assessment of "Don Quixote." It was the first modern work of Western literature, Foucault wrote, because in it "things are only what they are . . . without contents" (elles ne sont plus ce qu'elles sont . . . sans contenu).