NEW DELHI: Nigerian writer, filmmaker, jazz musician and cultural thinker Onyeka Nwelue has returned with a new literary novel "Tokyo Spies", which has drawn attention after a Japanese publisher reportedly acquired it in a major 85 million yen deal.
The novel, set in 1887, marks an unusual cross-cultural literary project by an African writer working with Japanese history, Chinese exile, calligraphy, family duty and moral reckoning.
The author also has an India connection.
Nwelue has worked, taught and travelled in India, and served as visiting assistant professor of African Literature at the University of Manipur, Imphal.
He is currently associated with the African Centre of India.
According to those associated with the book, "Tokyo Spies" is the first in a planned six-part literary project set in Japan.
The larger project is expected to explore themes of art, history, exile, cultural exchange and the moral cost of self-invention.
"Tokyo Spies" follows Zenjiro Ito, a young calligraphy student at Tokyo Imperial University, whose life begins to collapse after he learns that his entire family has fallen gravely ill.
Instead of returning home, Zenjiro flees to Tianjin in China, pretending that he is leaving Japan in pursuit of art.
In Tianjin, he is drawn into the lives of two women - Lin Ruo, warm and emotionally grounding, and Mei, disciplined, philosophical and exacting.
But the lie on which Zenjiro builds his new life cannot survive for long.
As his deception falls apart, he loses his home, his art, his lovers, his dignity and the future he had imagined for himself.
At the heart of the novel is calligraphy, not merely as an art form but as a language of truth, shame and self-confrontation.
Zenjiro's art becomes a mirror of his moral failure.
Reduced to living on the streets, he begins creating a new calligraphic style that blends Chinese and Japanese traditions.
The style emerges not as a performance of mastery, but as an act born out of exile, humiliation and humility.
A devastating letter eventually forces Zenjiro back to Japan, where he must confront the family he abandoned, the guilt he buried and the person he has become.
The novel asks whether art can redeem a person if it has first been used as a way of escaping the truth.
Nwelue has published more than 40 books, including "The Strangers of Braamfontein", which won the Crime Awards and the ANA Prize, and was described by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as "raunchy".
He is also the founding director of the James Currey Society in Oxford.
He has been an academic visitor at the University of Oxford, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, a visiting research fellow at Ohio University and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg.
His work as a filmmaker has also travelled widely.
His documentary "The House of Nwapa" was nominated in the Best Documentary category at the 2017 Africa Movie Academy Awards.
He later adapted his novella "Island of Happiness" into the Igbo-language film "Agwaetiti Obiuto", which was nominated at the 2018 Africa Movie Academy Awards in the Best First Feature Film and Best Film in an African Language categories.
The film also won Best Film by a Director at the Newark International Film Festival.
In 2024, his biopic of Emeka Ojukwu, "Other Side of History", was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and premiered at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.
Nwelue is currently studying calligraphy in Osaka in Japan, a detail that gives "Tokyo Spies" a closer artistic intimacy.
