by Nagai Kafu
During his four years in the United States, Kafû wrote very little: twenty-odd short stories and essays, about seventy letters, and an intermittent and laconic diary, Saiyû nisshi shô [Excerpts from the journal of a leisurely trip to the West]. This last was a somewhat fictional account, however, as a comparison with some of his notes makes clear. Among the short stories and essays he wrote while in America, fourteen appeared in various publications in Japan even before he returned home. And a month after he reached Japan, in August 1908, twenty-one of them appeared in a single volume entitled Amerika monogatari [American stories]. Subsequent editions of this volume, edited by Kafû himself, were to contain one additional
story. After his death, however, publishers added another piece written while he was still in the United States, so that today twenty-three pieces are generally included in what is referred to as Kafû’s American Stories. 3
The original publication of Amerika monogatari created a sensation. It was a welcome diversion in the literary scene in Japan, which was still dominated by the Japanese adaptation of the naturalist school, usually associated with the work of Emile Zola. When the French writer was first introduced to Japan, the chief function of so-called “Zolaism” was to initiate “efforts to throw off the didacticism, the eroticism, and the excessive decoration of late Tokugawa fiction,” as Edward Seidensticker summarizes in Kafû the Scribbler (1965). 4 It must be remembered, however, that in Japan what Zola had primarily meant by “naturalism” rapidly lost its distinctive character. In a country where no single religion had held sway over the intellectual life of the people, where the supernatural meant but little besides wandering ghosts, science as an antithesis to the long domination of religion, especially Catholicism, had little significance.
Literary banners and their actual products, of course, have more often than not little to do with actuality. Zola is a good example of this fact. In the case of modern Japanese literature, where divergent literary theories were introduced at random, frequently in the wrong historical order and in an incredibly short span of time, it would have been a miracle if naturalism had meant what it did in Europe. Scientifically proven truths, therefore, had different connotations in Japan. They had an intellectual appeal, but truths were equated with tangible phenomena, revealed in specific human instances. Thus an author’s life became the most reliable, often the only reliable, source of information about reality. Scientific truths that in the West had the same universalistic connotation as God became in Japan much more specific and personalized. It may be said that the autobiographical tradition of Japanese literature was now reinforced and reconfirmed by West- ern naturalism and gave Japanese naturalism a distinctively autobiographical character. Thus the Japanese reader was expected to judge and appreciate novels according to their authenticity and even the amount of biographical details they contained.
Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong about a rapprochement between life and literature. What bothered most critics of Japanese shishôsetsu (personal novels), among them Kafû, was their monotony. As the majority of the self-appointed propagators of naturalism came from the countryside to the city of Tokyo, they had a difficult time earning their living—a reward in itself since hardship provided ample material for their work. Yet since most of them relied on true, subjective experiences and tended not to express them in literary language or to generalize about them—in other words, overestimating their own sincerity in writing down the most trivial, meanest, or most shameful details of their lives—they often produced insipid “true stories.”
This was the background against which Kafû’s Amerika monogatari and other works were greeted with such enthusiasm. Readers had grown tired of drab autobiographical novels. For this very reason, however, Kafû came under frequent criticism because he hardly dealt with so-called “real life” situations, above all the hardships of everyday life. He was even stigmatized as a writer who was not serious or sincere enough because he had an independent income. Kafû, on his part, was disconcerted by the tendency among the naturalist writers to define real life in terms of the struggle to earn a living. Had not many a French author he and his critics equally admired been independently wealthy? Flaubert had not only enjoyed such income but also led a retired life, and he was still a great writer. And if Kafû goes a bit too far when he says, “the value of art is not determined by its content but by the way the thoughts in the content are conveyed,” he is also properly criticizing the shortcomings of the overall literary trends of his time. 5
It must also be noted that the great appeal of Amerika monogatari lay in the sheer volume of information and observations it contained about life in the United States. No such work had ever been published in Japan, where the people’s ideas about that country had been mostly formed by school textbooks and newspaper accounts. Here, for the first time, were twenty-odd vignettes from American life which, because of their intimate character and authenticity, offered readers a window to the country they had heard so much about. For a young man not yet thirty, to have collected such information from various parts of the United States was no mean achievement. Even today, these stories are striking in their freshness and intimacy.
MAJOR THEMES
The stories are fairly straightforward and need no elaborate explication here. But it would help to say a little about some themes they depict. First of all, there is much description of Japanese immigrants in these American stories. This is because Kafû’s life in the United States started when, on the West Coast, he came face to face with the ugly and miserable conditions of Chinese and Japanese laborers. In a letter to a literary society to which he had belonged in Japan, Kafû wrote, “The way Japanese people are ostracized in this place is almost unbelievable. It will be enough to tell you that no decent house or apartment will rent to Japanese or Chinese.” 6 But Kafû did not join other Japanese in denouncing American discrimination against their countrymen. Instead, his interest was more focused on what he saw as the law of the jungle among the Japanese immigrants themselves. “The Path in the Meadow,” “Atop the Hill” (its original title was “The Strong and the Weak”), and “Daybreak” are examples. In those short stories, the reader can sense something close to impatience toward the poor and their ugliness due to poverty, along with the author’s pity toward them, but at the same time Kafû is not easily carried away by patriotism or racial identity. He has been criticized for “going through the United States like a tourist, picking up knickknacks to be had more cheaply in Japan,” keeping a distance between himself and the other Japanese students or businessmen in America as well as ordinary immigrants, and ending up just an onlooker, but such a view seems to be wide of the mark. 7
In understanding his perspective on his fellow countrymen in the United States, “Night Fog” is revealing. This piece was published while he was still in America, and was not included in the editions of Amerika monogatari while he was alive. Its importance lies in part in the fact that among the short stories and essays he wrote while in the United States, it is the only piece written in literary Japanese. All the rest are written in colloquial style, except for “Night Stroll,” which is in epistolary style. As a result, the dialogue carried on in “Night Fog” between Kafû and a poor drunk Japanese laborer is positioned on the same level, unlike in a work in the colloquial style, which would have differentiated the two individuals’ languages according to their divergent social status—for, after all, there was no difference between the two as far as American onlookers, “with the disdainful look they show whenever they look at Japanese people,” were concerned. The literary style not only blunts the coarse language of the laborer but also blurs the starkness of the scene, in which the author himself is obviously an equal target of scorn. Yet the language as well as the dense fog in the story enhances its nightmarish quality, and it is likely that Kafû, who was an exceptionally sensitive and proud person, did not want to advertise his deeply wounded feelings. Thus he decided to bury the only piece that revealed them in
print and could damage his persona as a young artist leisurely observing the American landscape, society, and culture while nurturing his dream of going to France.
He must have felt much more comfortable once he moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where, of course, there was no concentration of
Japanese immigrants. A postcard written in English and sent to a friend in Tokyo described Kafû’s feelings: “I am very happy now in Michigan because I am treated no more as a ‘Jap’ as in Tacoma.” 8 (These were his exact words.) Indeed, he was treated like a guest at Kalamazoo College, when the Century Forum, its literary society, discussed the Portsmouth peace treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, and the members concluded, “Japan did herself an injustice in accepting the peace terms." 9 Despite such evidence of Kalamazoo College’s pro-Japanese atmosphere, Kafû did not once mention it in his writings, and unlike so many of his fellow countrymen abroad at that time, all he wrote about the Russo-Japanese war in his published diary was just these words: “It was reported that Port Arthur fell.” 10 It may well be that, while he was deeply hurt on the West Coast, he did not take the experience as a personal, let alone a national, insult, and that by the same token he was not going to feel elated just because his country had won a war, and a dubious victory at that. Likewise, during the Second World War, he was one of the very few Japanese writers who did not join the propaganda campaign to denigrate the United States.
Second, the American Stories are full of Western art and music, something rather novel in the Japanese literary scene. The World’s Fair at St. Louis that Kafû visited on his way to Kalamazoo not only impressed him with its grand scale but also gave him a welcome chance to appreciate Western paintings. Included in the French section was Renoir’s Odalisque, which may have inspired the painting mentioned in “The Inebriated Beauty,” as did, undoubtedly, Maupassant’s “Les Soeurs Rondoli.” The only nude painting in the American exhibition was by Julian L. Stewart, an American artist in Paris. 11 Kafû had taken Japanese painting lessons as a child and developed a keen eye for the visual arts, and there are many scenes among the stories in Amerika monogatari that seem to be almost straight out of paintings, for instance, the window scene in “Atop the Hill,” the sunset in “In the Woods,” and the views of Staten Island in “A June Night’s Dream.”
Though Kafû was so visually oriented, the world of music was equally important to him. He was familiar with traditional Japanese music, and before going to the United States he had also attended some performances of Western music. But it was in New York City that he discovered the “hidden world of fine music.” 12 He had shared the common prejudice among Japanese writers that a noisy commercial metropolis in the New World could not possibly be a home for music, but he soon realized, once he went to New York, that the city was like a World’s Fair whose wealth attracted great musicians, including singers, from all over the world. Indeed, his stay in the city coincided with the golden age of the opera in America when Caruso, Scotti, Sembrich, Melba, and others came to stay for a whole season and sing in various productions. Furthermore, the operagoer in New York had the advantage of being able to listen to any piece sung in its original tongue—in contrast to Paris, where mostly French works were performed and where non-French operas were sung in French translation. Kafû became an avid concert- and operagoer and frequented the Metropolitan Opera as well as Carnegie and Mendelssohn Halls. “Old Regrets” in Amerika monogatari is a piece directly based on an opera, but Kafû published several other pieces, such as detailed accounts of Gounod’s Faust and Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust. (These accounts were included in Furansu monogatari [French stories], which was scheduled for publication in 1909. But its publication was banned, ostensibly because of its “offense against public morals,” but more likely because some of the pieces included critical comments about the Japanese government. The volume was not published in more or less its original form till 1948, although a greatly truncated version was issued in 1915.) Even though his detailed description of Gounod’s music and the production of the opera was largely based on Esther Singleton’s A Guide to the Opera (1899), the appreciation and enthusiasm of the Japanese author who was able to attend the performances are vividly expressed and must have deeply impressed his readers in Japan. 13
Third, the stories included in American Stories are heavily influenced by French literature, but it should be noted that Kafû did not merely graft his favorite French authors’ or poets’ works onto his own. This can be seen in the contrast between the American Stories, full of the youthful ecstasy of an author who has found ample raw material for his creative effort, and the French Stories, where the overwhelming tone is that of dejection and disillusionment. In part this is due to the inevitable sense of letdown Kafû felt when his dream, going to France, was finally fulfilled. But in the French Stories the melancholy tone seems to have been largely deliberate. Kafû had read Gustave Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale while in the United States. Its central theme is the negative character of human desire, the fulfillment of which kills the desire itself. With Flaubert this was an expression of the psychology of a transitional generation, a génération manquée that had experienced in its youth the failure of both the Revolution and the Commune. Kafû too can be said to have belonged to such a generation. For the generation that preceded his in Japan, to go abroad, especially to the West, had almost automatically meant bringing back to the homeland something substantial, be it knowledge of Western technology, scholarship, or literature. But with Kafû’s generation, the horizon had been narrowed; French specialists in Japan often considered his own efforts to introduce French literature to Japan dilettantish and unscholarly. However, for him the disappointment was more complex. In “Fallen Leaves,” he dramatizes his own wish as an author to communicate “in elegant English” with Americans, especially American women. But in France, even such a daydream was impossible. As he was unable to communicate in French, his love for France and its culture was entirely unrequited, and he remained a complete outsider during the ten months he lived there.
Finally, it is worth considering the relationship between Kafû’s American experiences and his famous fascination with the pleasure quarters. He is best known for his writings on the fast-vanishing world of Edo that still existed in Tokyo at the turn of the century, above all the demimonde and the women who inhabited it. The geisha and, later, vaudeville-house dancers, barmaids, and street girls who came to dominate Tokyo’s night life were to serve as heroines in his novels. “Serious” authors and critics, for whom modern literature meant nothing more than drab descriptions of artists’ financial or marital problems, often labeled Kafû a frivolous writer. Even today, he is frequently criticized for having been unable to describe “nonprofessional” women (as opposed to “professional” ones such as geisha and barmaids), for treating women, both in real life and in his novels, in a pitying or patronizing way at best and in a trifling, satirical, even sarcastic manner at worst. It is true that he had little patience with and felt sorry for the typical middle-class women of his time. He considered the traditional self-effacing, modest, and docile young woman or housewife exasperating rather than exemplary, as is clear in “Atop the Hill,” “January First,” and “Spring and Autumn.” On the other hand, the modern, educated woman, frequently the product of a missionary school, was to him “frightfully moralistic, a self-righteous prude.” 14 For this reason, many readers and critics consider Kafû a male chauvinist who looked down on women, particularly those he considered prudish, snobbish, or pedantic.
Yet he clearly had his own image of the ideal woman, who would be his social and intellectual equal and still retain her femininity; in other words, somebody like Rosalyn in “A June Night’s Dream.” The fact that he developed this image while in the United States cannot be overemphasized. This may explain his decision, upon returning to Japan, to write almost exclusively about the women of Tokyo’s demimonde. As one of the characters in his mid-length novel, Reishô [Sneers, 1909-1910],
puts it, “[Japanese] society is still far from requiring a woman to be other than the good-wife-and-wise-mother type . . . to discuss women in these terms is a totally utilitarian attitude.” 15 He must have felt it was quite unrealistic for a Japanese novelist to introduce well-rounded and interesting female characters into his work. The typical middle-class family in Japan was simply the wrong milieu, especially for a writer like Kafû who enjoyed French works in which adultery was a prominent theme and flirtation was elevated to an art form. In contrast, the pleasure quarters at its peak during the Edo period had been a place of taste and refinement where geisha—highly skilled musicians and dancers—were frequently better versed in literature than their “nonprofessional” counterparts. It was also a place where the discerning connoisseur (with whom Kafû identified) was preferred to the socially prominent, where men and women could exchange witty comments on literature, the Kabuki theater, or music and thus embellish the crude realities of the place.
It is true that the pleasure quarters of Kafû’s time no longer fit the descriptions in the late Edo popular literature he admired. Yet that world is distantly recalled in the family gathering in “Two Days in Chicago,” where music is so much a part of life. In Sneers, the only protagonist who seems to share his wife’s interests and taste is the Kabuki playwright, Nakatani. His wife, Okimi, comes from a pleasure quarters teahouse and has been brought up like a geisha. She is proud of the fact that her husband’s charm enables him to exploit women rather than being exploited by them. Okimi is also proud that her young daughter is taking dancing lessons with some apprentice geisha. While watching the little girl, Ochô, another protagonist, who is a writer, cannot help feeling
