Suzuki Bokushi (1770–1842) was a peasant-entrepreneur, essayist and amateur haikai poet who lived in the Echigo province of Tokugawa period Japan, a region which gets the highest amount of snowfall in the world. Bokushi wrote about the people of his region, their customs, their lifestyle, their relationship with the natural world and the folklores of the region in a book entitled Hokuetsu Seppu (1837). This essay will examine the ways this book interrogated the dominant cultural discourse and offered new ways of thinking about centre and periphery, urban and rural. An analysis of the text and context of the book will show how ‘provinciality’ was deployed to question and de-centre prevailing cultural norms, and how a new aesthetic sense was developed that contrasted and questioned the urban sensibilities prevailing in the political centre. This essay will argue that Bokushi’s book articulates a significant critique of the urban-centric discourse of classical Japanese literature, while also offering an alternative rural aesthetic, thereby countering the hegemonic tendency to read the Japanese past through the lens of urban-centric literature. His writings are what Fredric Jameson would call a ‘nonhegemonic cultural voice’.

中文翻译：

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边缘能说话吗：德川日本边缘的自我表现在铃木木志的《北越七风》中

铃木木志 (1770-1842) 是一位农民企业家、散文家和业余海开诗人，他住在德川时代日本越后省，该地区是世界上降雪量最多的地区。Bokushi 在一本名为 Hokuetsu Seppu (1837) 的书中写到了他所在地区的人民、他们的习俗、他们的生活方式、他们与自然世界的关系以及该地区的民间传说。本文将探讨本书审问主流文化话语的方式，并提供思考中心与边缘、城市与乡村的新方式。对这本书的文本和背景的分析将展示“地方性”如何被用来质疑和去中心化流行的文化规范，以及如何发展一种新的审美意识来对比和质疑政治中心盛行的城市敏感性。本文将论证 Bokushi 的书对日本古典文学中以城市为中心的话语进行了重要批判，同时也提供了另一种乡村美学，从而对抗通过以城市为中心的文学视角来阅读日本过去的霸权倾向。他的作品就是弗雷德里克詹姆逊所说的“非霸权文化之声”。