American Stories

by Nagai Kafu

  “Oh, it’s so cold!” Flora and Julia shivered in a theatrical manner and started out toward Sixth Avenue. It was already the middle of December, and although the sound of the city’s streetcars, which ran throughout the night, could be heard incessantly, coming and going like waves that dash against the shore, some profound sadness permeated their bodies; Broadway, spread out beyond the theater at the corner, was still brightly lit, as earlier in the evening, but its streetlights looked paler than the moon, chillier than water, making the great city appear more lonesome now than at any other time.

  The two drew closer together as if by common consent and walked for thirty feet or so, when from behind two or three carriages waiting for customers in front of the aforementioned hotel where chorus girls and others stayed overnight, a man appeared, with a large pipe stuck in his mouth.

  “Aren’t you rather early tonight?”

  Julia recognized him against the flickering light in the area and said, “Well, it’s been a long time.”

  The man was Flora’s husband, the streetcar conductor, who always waited for his wife in this area, still wearing his regulation cap and uniform, at the end of his shift at four o’clock. Flora lightly kissed him and said, “There was a police raid, so we thought it was a bad omen and decided to call it quits at four o’clock.”

  “Is that right? But was the business good?” asked the shameless husband. The wife, equally unperturbed, replied as she looked back at Julia, “Well, it wasn’t much, but still we were all pretty busy, weren’t we?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded. “But the best one’s still Blanche. I can’t do like that.”

  “Flora, you’d better learn from her.”

  “Don’t tell me, it’s none of your business.”

  “I’m telling you out of kindness.”

  “You are?” Flora hit the man in the face with her muff.

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha. Don’t be angry.”

  They reached Sixth Avenue and stopped in front of a bar that was unlit outside but kept open all through the night.

  Julia’s husband was a waiter at this bar. As Flora and her husband said, “Well, so long,” and started to go, Julia stopped them, saying, “You don’t have to hurry, do you? Can’t you come in and see my darling for a change?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  They pushed open an inconspicuous door at the back, with a sign marked FAMILY ENTRANCE, and went in, Julia leading the way.

  There would still be time before daybreak on a winter night. From a deserted straight road, one could hear the baritone voice of a man, singing either because he was drunk or because he wanted to overcome the chill:

  . . . I wish that I were with you; dear, to-night; For I’m lonesome and unhappy here without you, You can tell, dear[,] by the letter that I write.

  All of a sudden, the sound of an elevated train shaking and assaulting the city. Somewhere, a dog started barking.

  (April 1907)

  January First

  As was customary every year, on the evening of January first a Tônimochi [vegetable soup with rice cake] party was held at the official residence of the manager of Tôyô Bank’s American branch to celebrate the coming of the new year. Nearly twenty people came, many besides the gentlemen of the bank, since everybody was living the bachelor life in boarding houses while in the United States and had no other opportunity to taste even a glass of toso [spiced sake] for the occasion.

  Extremely busily waiting on the guests are Kitty, the maid of German extraction who has been working at this official residence for three generations of managers; a male student said to be a distant relative of the manager’s wife; and at times, even the wife herself.

  “Who would have thought that we would be treated to such a feast in America?” someone gravely expresses his thanks, stroking his moustache, while another says to the wife with a broad grin, “This has finally cured me of my homesickness,” and someone else takes another drink and mumbles an excuse, “It’s been two years since I celebrated New Year’s like this.”

  Unlike at a dinner with Westerners, they don’t have to worry about making noise while having their soup, so in the spacious dining room with all the windows shut, noises begin to resound from the large crowd chewing mochi, slurping the soup, and before long crunching gomame [small dried sardines], herring roe, and seaweed; after a while, shouts of “How about a drink?” are heard as people pass cups of sake from various tables that are beyond others’ reach. All of a sudden, in the middle of this chattering whose uproar echoes like the croaking of frogs, a drunken voice could be heard—“Kaneda hasn’t come again? He’s become too Westernized”—sounding as if in need of an adversary.

  “That Kaneda, he’s a strange man, he never shows up at a party serving Japanese food. He is said to detest nothing as much as Japanese sake and cooked rice. . . .”

  “Detests cooked rice . . . that’s really strange. Is he also from your . . . bank?” someone asked.

  “Yes,” said the manager, the host. “He’s been in the United States for six, seven years . . . and says he wants to spend the rest of his life abroad.”

  The whole company’s noisy conversation immediately focused on this odd person. The manager, as might be expected of an elderly gentleman, contributed a mild, noncommittal comment, “He may not be very affable, but he is a reserved, gentle person, and is indispensable for our business because of his knowledge of the United States,” then drank from his sake cup.

  “But he doesn’t seem to know much about social life. After all, even if he doesn’t like sake or cooked rice, he is still a Japanese, especially on a night like this, on January first,” grumbled the drunken one who had first spoken.

  He provoked a response from a new voice coming from a corner of the room, as someone who had not spoken said quietly, “Well, I wouldn’t criticize him too much. Rather, let’s be more tolerant because people do have unexpected reasons; I learned just the other day that there is a good reason why he dislikes sake and cooked Japanese rice.” “Is that right?”

  “I’ve become quite sympathetic toward him.”

  “What on earth do you mean by that?”

  “The story isn’t exactly fit for the New Year,” the new speaker prefaced, but then went on:

  “Just the other day, it was two or three evenings before Christmas. I had to choose presents for Westerners and decided I should ask Kaneda, as he has been here a long time; so he showed me around various stores on Broadway, and on the way home, I casually suggested that since it was getting late and I was hungry, we might go to a nearby Chinese restaurant, to which he responded that Chinese food was all right, but he hated the sight of cooked rice. . . . So I let him take me to a French restaurant. Likes wine, that fellow. He quickly emptied two or three glasses and, a little drunk perhaps, was intently fixing his eyes on the reflection of the electric light on his glass half filled with bright red wine; then suddenly he asked, ‘Are both of your parents well?’ Thinking what a strange fellow he was, I answered, ‘Yes, they are,’ whereupon he bowed his head and told me, ‘My . . . father is still healthy, but my mother died just before I graduated from school.’

  “At a loss for an answer, I killed time by having a drink of water, though I had no taste for it.

  “‘Does your father drink?’ he asked after a little while.

  “‘Not really; he drinks beer from time to time. Nothing much.’

  “‘You must have a peaceful household then. Alcohol does so much damage. I intend to avoid it altogether but can’t quite do so, maybe from heredity. One thing, though . . . I simply cannot drink Japanese sake; just the smell of it makes me sick.’

  “‘Why?’

  “‘Because it reminds me of my dead mother. Not just sake, but cooked rice, miso soup, every Japanese dish immediately brings back a memory of my deceased mother. Would you care to hear the story?

  “‘My father may be known to some; he was a justice of the Supreme Court, though he is retired now. He was educated before the [Meij
i] Restoration and was not only a scholar of the Chinese classics but also wrote Chinese-style poems and was adept at tea ceremony in the Kyôto style. He was a connoisseur of calligraphy, paintings, and curios, as well as of swords, bonsai, and bonseki [miniature landscapes], so that the whole house was like a gardener’s yard combined with a second-hand curio shop. Almost every day, bald curio dealers, always wearing glasses, and a train of strange, sycophantic officials of the kind rather rare nowadays, and court clerks would come over and never leave till past midnight, talking and drinking with my father. And my mother alone had to wait on them and keep the sake bottles warm. To be sure, we had as many as two servants, a housemaid and a kitchen maid, but my father was very fussy about food, as is often the case with a tea connoisseur, so that my mother simply couldn’t leave the maids in charge. She prepared all three meals for my father, warming sake and even cooking rice. Even so, his taste must not have been entirely satisfied, for he never lifted his chopsticks for his three meals without complaining about the food. Even when he had his miso soup in the morning, he would grumble about the flavor of the Sanshû miso, or about the amount of salt, saying things like: What a way to slice the takuan [pickled daikon]. It’s stupid to serve shiokara [salted fish guts] on this plate. What happened to the Kiyomizu ware I bought the other day? Did you break it again? Be more careful, for heaven’s sake. . . . It was just like a caricaturization by a rakugoka [storyteller], enough to give you a headache just by listening to it.

  “‘My mother not only had to be an eternally unappreciated cook, but also had to take care of fragile objects of art and curios as well as bonsai, with regard to which he would always find some fault, just as with her cooking, instead of thanking her. So the first sound I ever heard in my life was my father’s grumbling in a husky voice, and my first view in memory was my mother with her kimono sleeves always tucked up with a tasuki [sash cord]; before anything else, my innocent child’s mind was impressed with the idea that fathers were always to be feared, and mothers always to be pitied.

  “‘I was practically never held on my father’s lap. True, from time to time he would call my name in a gentle voice, but I cowered like a cat and was too frightened to come near him. As I told you already, what he ate was never suitable for a child, so I didn’t have a single meal together with him. As I grew from an infant to a boy, my sentiments toward my father steadily grew less and less affectionate and, on the contrary, I began to consider him a ruthless and tyrannical demon, while my mother seemed to be leading a life completely devoid of amusement or pleasure, although I must admit this may have been more a reflection of my hatred of my father than what my mother really felt.

  “‘From these surroundings and with these preconceptions, I eventually advanced to middle school; there, as I read English texts with depictions of happy family life or the life of innocent children, as well as journals and other readings available in those days, I became strongly impressed with Western thought that was filled with words like love and home. At the same time, an extremely defiant spirit steadily and firmly established itself within my bosom, deeming Confucianism and Bushidô [way of the warrior], which my father used to talk about, obstacles to a happy life. As I grew older, I could not even engage in small talk with my father without disagreeing with him, and so, upon graduating from middle school and entering a vocational school, I left home and lived in a dormitory. Occasionally, on the way back after visiting my mother, I would often dream of the time, three years hence, when I would graduate, leave my father, establish my own home, and invite my mother for a happy meal. . . . But alas, life is but a dream, and my mother passed away in the winter before my graduation.

  “‘What happened apparently was that one night, it suddenly began to snow close to midnight, and my father told my mother to wake up the housemaid or somebody to bring the pine-tree bonsai he had recently bought into the house; he had placed it on a stepping stone in the garden, and its shape would be damaged by the weight of the snow if it were left there on this snowy night. But my mother knew that, unfortunately, the maid had a slight cold that day and was not feeling well, so she didn’t have the heart to ask her. She opened the sliding shutters and went out into the garden by herself, wearing only her nightgown, to carry back the heavy pine bonsai in the snow. . . . She caught a cold that night that soon developed into acute pneumonia.

  “‘I received an utterly bitter blow. From then on, whenever I went to a sukiyaki house or other restaurant with friends and heard them complain about the way the sake was warmed or the rice cooked, I would immediately be reminded of my mother’s miserable life and feel like crying; likewise, whenever I observed people buying garden plants at a fair or some such occasion, I would feel as if I were witnessing an extremely tragic event and couldn’t help trembling.

  “‘Fortunately, however, once I left Japan and came to this country, everything completely changed, and since nothing reminded me of those miseries, I felt incredibly at ease spiritually. I hardly know what homesickness means. Some Japanese frequently find fault with American homes or women, but for me it is enough to witness a scene by the dining table where the husband slices the meat and puts it on a plate for his wife, while the wife in return pours tea and slices a piece of cake for him; it doesn’t matter if these are superficial, hypocritical formalities, because such a scene makes me feel so good, and I don’t want to dispel the lovely impression by inquiring into what lies below the surface.

  “‘I rejoice each time I see a young woman taking a big bite out of a sandwich or an unpeeled apple at a spring picnic in the fields, or married women drinking champagne and chattering away at a restaurant late at night after the opera or the theater with little regard for their husbands or the other men in the group, or other even more extreme examples; at least they are enjoying themselves, having fun, and are happy. Because I never saw a mother or a wife in a happy state, such scenes are so soothing to me.

  “‘Now you understand, I hope, why I don’t like Japanese food or sake. Only Western wine, which is produced in a country that has nothing to do with my past, and only Western cuisine, which is totally different in form and taste from what used to torment my mother, enable me to experience the pleasure of a meal.’

  “Such was Kaneda’s story, and he proceeded to order a couple of bottles of champagne over my protest, saying he wanted to thank me for listening to his life story. As might be expected of someone knowledgeable about the West, he is quite well acquainted with the brands of wine and champagne.”

  The speaker finished and picked up his chopsticks to resume eating the Tôni. Silence fell upon the company for some time, except for the clear sound of the manager’s wife sighing; it seemed that women’s hearts tended to be more sensitive toward all things.

  (May 1907)

  Daybreak

  Coney Island, the summer playground built at the west-projecting end of Long Island, is a frequent topic of conversation among men and women not only in New York but throughout the United States. It is like Okuyama of Asakusa and Shibaura [west of Tokyo Bay] rolled into one and magnified to an amazingly large scale, and can be reached from New York in about half an hour, either by land via the elevated train running through the streets of Brooklyn, or by water on a steamboat down the Hudson River.

  There is probably not a more vulgar, crowded place in the world. You can tell from the statistics in newspapers that on Sundays tens of thousands of men and women go there. There are scores of large-scale shows using electricity and water to astound the crowd; some contain useful information on history and geography, while some are naturally more disreputable, in dance halls and obscene vaudeville houses. Every night there are bright displays of fireworks. On a clear night, when one gets on a riverboat and looks at the wide bay of New York City, one is amazed at the lights from electrical lamps and illuminations brightening the entire sky as if it were daybreak; and beyond the sea, numerous buildings stand both tall and low, looking like the Ryûgû [legendary dragon] palace.


  Among the many games in this vast Coney Island is tamakorogashi, Japanese Rolling Ball [sic], one of the most popular. It is nothing fancy, just like shooting or rolling games at Okuyama, where you win one of the prizes that adorn the whole store by rolling a number of balls. But because it is run by Japanese, and hence exotic, and also because it is like gambling, where you may win a valuable prize if you are lucky, it has become quite popular. No one knows since when; certainly it has been thriving even more since the Russo-Japanese war, and every summer there are more and more such rolling ball shops.

  You can tell that most Japanese owners of these shops are over forty years of age, determined to make a killing from this popular enterprise. Their appearance and manners somehow suggest their situation in life as labor bosses, desperados, or hooligans. They have come to the United States after experiencing many hardships in their native Japan and, having tried just about everything in America, have reached the stage where they say it’s no big deal to live in this world, you won’t die even if you eat dirt. On the other hand, those working for them who, every day, count the number of balls rolled by customers and hand them their prizes, are either unemployed people who have not yet been hardened by failures in life but somehow hope to succeed their bosses or young men who have impetuously come to the United States to work their way through college.