American Stories

by Nagai Kafu

  That evening, I had a most memorable and pleasant dinner. Stella’s sweetheart, James, came home, and her father, the elderly judge, returned. After they had dinner, joined by her mother, the young couple complied with my request and played that “Träumerei.” Under the dim light from a colored electric lamp with a flower-shaped shade, he sat at the piano with his broad-shouldered back turned in our direction, while she stood right next to him, holding her violin and almost leaning against him. Near them were the gray-haired mother and the bespectacled elderly judge with a large, bald head, and outside the glass windows footsteps of someone hurriedly walking in the slightly humid March night.

  Before long the young couple finished their playing, and as soon as the young woman put down her instrument, she threw herself into James’s arms, as if she could no longer wait, and twice kissed him passionately. Her parents eagerly applauded and asked them to play again, but she kept her face firmly pressed against his chest, as if she were unable to restrain her deep emotions. But then she straightened herself suddenly, picked up her instrument, and this time played that merry tune, “Dixie,” a great favorite of Americans, to which even the elderly judge responded by beating time with his feet as he sat on the sofa.

  Oh, how I wish that such a pleasant family scene could be duplicated soon in our homeland.

  Think, for instance, of the way I was brought up at my home, by a father whose warm human blood had been chilled by the Confucian classics, and a mother who had been restrained by treatises on womanly virtue and behavior. In such an environment, there is no room for music or laughter. My father would indulge in the pleasure of drinking with his friends till even past midnight and assail my mother, already exhausted from the day’s chores, for the way the sake was warmed or the food cooked; alas, looking at my father’s face on such an occasion, vicious and autocratic, and my mother’s sad, lethargic face accustomed to blind obedience, I used to think, while still a child, that nothing in the world was as detestable as a father, and nothing as unhappy as a mother. But if progress is the law of the world, such a barbaric, Confucian age will soon become a thing of the past, and our new era will sound a triumphal tune.

  Presently the clock chimed nine. James had told me that since there was, unfortunately, no extra room at Stella’s, he would take me to a private boarding house three houses down the road; so I said good night to the whole family and went out with James.

  I looked for words to tell James, “How blessed is your love!” but I was distracted by the irregular movement of the night clouds in the sky, so walked silently, while he whistled a popular tune, and in no time we reached the entrance to the boarding house.

  Even though it was called a boarding house, there was nothing special about it. It seemed that the number of rooms and their layout were almost identical to those of Stella’s house. I was taken by the mistress of the house to the best room available for rent, located at the front, and, after James left in five minutes or so, quickly changed and quietly lay down on the bed.

  I had put out the gaslight in the room and so had a full view of the night sky from the windows with shades raised. Even though the sky was dark, it was faintly light outside, perhaps because the moon was hiding behind the coming and going of the clouds, enabling me to discern the trees by the roadside and the faraway buildings standing like so many shadows; fortunately, however, I was so tired after the train ride that before I could think of anything, I fell soundly asleep like a heavy stone sinking to the bottom of the sea.

  March 17—When I woke up, it was eight o’clock and I saw the morning sun sparkling on the thoroughly wet windowpanes. Standing near a window as I dressed, I looked out at the windblown twigs scattered here and there over the wet pavement; there must have been a storm.

  It was amazing that I had been able to sleep throughout the night without even a dream. It is the lot of us poor humans to be endlessly tormented by various dreams. But thanks to last night’s dreamless sleep, for the first time I was able to achieve comfort and happiness away from daily toil, like those animals who lie down under shady trees in the meadows.

  I went down to the dining room for breakfast, which, I had been told, was set for nine o’clock.

  There are three small tables, each seating four people. By the table at the far end, two middle-aged men, apparently tradesmen, are reading the Chicago Tribune. At the center table is a woman who looks like a student. The mistress of the house brings me to this table, and the woman who has been wearily waiting for her breakfast immediately begins talking to me, seeing that I am a foreigner.

  But her questions are typical of those asked by just about ten out of ten people— When did you come to this country? Do you like America, aren’t you homesick? Don’t you think Japanese tea tastes good? Aren’t Japanese kimonos beautiful? I am crazy about things Japanese. . . .

  I wanted to switch the conversation to anything but this, and as soon as possible, when, fortunately, a young girl of about fourteen or fifteen whose long hair was tied with a black ribbon brought over our breakfast; so, seizing the opportunity, I asked as I picked up my knife, “Are you a student at the university?”

  “Yes, in the literature department,” she answers. Feeling somewhat encouraged by this, I continue,“Literature . . . then you do read novels?”

  “Yes, I love them,” says the woman without hesitation. It seems that in America, unlike Japan, there are no unfair regulations explicitly prohibiting female students from reading novels.

  She rattled off numerous titles of recently published novels and discussed them, but unfortunately, as I had not paid any attention to American literature till then, I was not particularly able to appreciate her learned argument. Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Henry James are about all the American writers I know. I think it was at the end of last year that a friend of mine in New York sent me some works by two or three famous authors, but I only managed to read about half of each book and didn’t go beyond that. I still occasionally flip through a magazine, but for some reason I don’t seem to be able to find, among the works of this new continent, gentle features like those in Daudet or Turgenev. It may be that lovely works like theirs, filled with imaginary visions, do not appeal to American taste.

  Breakfast was over sooner than I expected. The female student said, “The spring convocation will be held tomorrow afternoon on campus at Mandel Hall, so you may be interested in coming,” and, picking up a book that lay on the table, left the room, smoothing out her bangs with one hand.

  Almost at that very moment the doorbell rang, and the girl who had served us told me, “You have a visitor.”

  I went out and saw that it was James. Wearing his derby slightly tilted back, he said, “Good morning,” several times in his usual casual voice, adding that as he was going downtown to work, I might go with him and do some sightseeing. I readily agreed to his proposal, and we went out into the street to take the train to the city from the same station where I had gotten off yesterday afternoon.

  As this is the time of the day when all sorts of Chicagoans go to work for various firms and stores downtown, the cars are filled with men and women, and practically no seat is empty. They are voraciously reading newspapers with the fierce look of those who want to take in the maximum amount of information within the minimum length of time. At stations where the trains stop every five or ten minutes, there is not a single person who is waiting for a train without a newspaper. What a newspaper-loving people they are. They will say, the people of a progressive nation must try to find out as much as possible what is happening in the world, and at the earliest moment. . . . Ah, but don’t they realize that there is nothing unusual or strange about the world’s affairs, the same old muddle repeating itself again and again? In diplomacy, it is the conflict of interests between A and B; in wars, it is the strong that win; banks going bankrupt, intrigues during elections, train derailments, thefts, murders, such daily occurrences of life are always the same and monotonous to the extreme. Hasn’t the French writ
er, Maupassant, already suffered unbearable pain from this excruciatingly boring life and written in his diary, On the Water [Sur l’eau]:

  Blessed are those who are unaware that the same abominable things are endlessly repeated. Blessed are those who ride today and tomorrow the same carriages, drawn by the same animals, and have the energy, under the same sky, in front of the same horizon, to do the same work in the same way, surrounded by the same pieces of furniture. Blessed are those who do not realize with an unbearable hatred that nothing will change or happen in this weary and tired world. . . .

  In that sense, Americans who yearn to know about the events of this monotonous life as ardently as the starving crave food should be considered the most blessed ones.

  The train keeps running along the lake’s shoreline. I hardly have the time to reflect that it feels somewhat like passing by the vicinities of Shinbashi and Shinagawa [in Tokyo, along Tokyo Bay] when the train reaches the terminal, and the passengers hurriedly stand up from their seats. James tells me that this is called Van Buren station, the entrance to the busiest commercial center of Chicago.

  The innumerable men and women pouring out of the train go across the sturdy stone bridge that is connected to the platform, almost rubbing shoulders. Michigan Avenue, where many cars come and go as quickly as the wind, can be seen beyond the bridge, and tall buildings, all more than twenty stories high, are vying with each other on all the wide streets running westward from Michigan Avenue. The sky is overcast, which is typical of the month of March, and besides, these tall buildings obstruct the sunlight from both sides of the streets, with the result that one notices something black like darkness, neither dust nor smoke, swirling there. And the multitudes of men and women who have just crossed the stone bridge have fast disappeared, as if they were being swallowed up, into this darkness—this darkness that is Chicago.

  I was struck with a great sense of terror. At the same time, I felt an irresistible urge to join the destroyers of civilization, even before I had time to consider its pros and cons. The honest Japanese farmer comes to Tokyo, the capital of Japan, as a tourist and is overwhelmed by its prosperity (if one can call it that) and goes back to his thatched-roofed cottage full of admiration and respect, but the young man who has been exposed to the ideas of the age even once is prone to engage in the wildest of fantasies, the more he sees and the more he hears. At the thought of all this folly, I stopped walking and lingered on the stone bridge, when James turned back and, smiling for some reason, called to me as if he were asking me a question, “Great city!”

  “Yes. Big monster [sic],” I answered—how should I describe it, except to say, as people often do, that it is a monster?

  James pointed to the tall buildings on Michigan Avenue ahead of us and explained: that is a hotel called Annequis, the next one is a theater called the Auditorium, the distant one is the tower of a company dealing in wholesale orders [Merchandise Exchange]. After having pointed to this and that building one after another, he suggested that, as there was still time, he would take me to a large store called Marshall Field’s.

  “The largest in Chicago. . . . Even New York doesn’t have such a large store. So we can say it is the largest in the world. There are some seven hundred female employees alone.”

  James must not be wrong. A visit to this store is almost a duty for any traveler who passes through Chicago. It sells all kinds of daily goods such as clothes, furniture, notions, shoes, and cosmetics, and stands like a castle at one corner of State Street, which is the main street of this city. I slipped through the crowd and took the elevator to the top of the building, which is close to twenty stories high, and looked down, leaning against the well-polished brass railing.

  The building is just like a huge tube with a hollow center, enabling the sunlight that enters through the glass ceiling at the top to reach all the way down, so that it is possible to enjoy the rare view of people walking in and out of the bottom, stone floor several hundred feet below! Men and women are hardly as big as our thumbs, and they worm their way through, moving their arms and legs; are there more comical playthings than these? But realizing that the same small and helpless-looking people had been able to build this tall, large building that reached the clouds, I could not help feeling proud of the glory of human development, even though I had but a short while earlier cursed civilization.

  People will laugh at the frivolity of my undecided mind. But it simply means that the human mind changes and floats always and endlessly according to circumstances and surroundings. For instance, it is just like our hoping for the cold weather of winter on a summer day and longing for the warmth of summer on a winter day; there is no absolute truth, whether in Luther’s Protestantism, Rousseau’s liberty, or Tolstoy’s peace. These are all voices called forth by circumstance.

  James said he had to go to work, so we went down together by elevator and parted company at the store’s entrance. As for myself, I intended to go to the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue.

  (March 1905, Michigan)

  The Sea in Summer

  I am staying at the residence of my elder cousin Sosen, which is seven or eight miles away from the poor quarters of the East Side, where people sometimes die as a result of the scorching heat; though it is still within the city limits of New York its uptown location is very quiet, and from its fifth-floor windows you can see, in the west, the upper reaches of the Hudson River, and in the east, the deep woods of Columbia University. On the other hand, the heat searing into the paving stones and bricks turns all the rooms into hothouses even before people wake up, and as sweat oozes from all over our bodies like oil, we have no appetite at the breakfast table and don’t even want to finish our bowls of oatmeal.

  As it is a Sunday, Sosen proposes to show me around and take me to New Jersey’s Asbury Park, a bathing beach that is something like Zushi or Ôiso [on the outskirts of Tokyo].

  We left home at once, rode the subway for just thirty minutes or so, from the northern to the southern end of the city, climbed up the stone steps of the station, walked through the downtown streets of New York where the tallest buildings stand, that is, the quintessential New York, and reached the south pier. There were people everywhere, on the decks of the steamship moored alongside the pier, at the ticket booth, in the park in front of the pier; even Americans are said to marvel at the number of people everywhere in the city when they first come to New York, so for someone faint-hearted like me, it was discouraging, and “we won’t be able to get on” was my natural response. But Sosen, who has long been accustomed to this sort of crazy scene and is what you call “smart,” wasn’t the least fazed and, taking my hand, forced himself into the crowd and somehow found a path for us to climb up to the deck of the steamship and even to sit down on folding chairs he found somewhere.

  The ship unmoored in about five minutes, and by the time the dresses of women going back and forth on the pier began to look like flowers in a garden, a grand view of the Hudson’s estuary was totally spread out before us. I believe there must be few scenes as grand as this. At the center are the tall buildings of New York rising high in the brilliant summer sky, at the right [sic] the cities of New Jersey with their smoke trailing out like clouds, and on the left [sic] the great Brooklyn Bridge, under which freely pass numerous steamships coming from the world’s harbors, then the town of Brooklyn. A most amazing battleground of peace. And the Statue of Liberty gazes down on it in one sweep, raising a spear [sic] with one hand and soaring high above the sea far away from the harbor.

  I have never seen a bronze statue of such dignity. Unconsciously, I felt an urge to kneel down at her feet and pray, and though at first I wondered if I had inherited some sort of idol-worshipping instinct from my ancestors, I came to the realization that this profound emotion was induced by the impeccable choice of the statue’s location, which is the first principle of constructing statues. With any work of art, it is impossible to maximize its effect if the so-called accessories are neglected, and I think this
is particularly true of statues and monuments. Nobody who, traveling on a tiny leaflike boat, comes within a distant view of the great city of the democratic nation and looks up at this enormous statue rising above the Atlantic Ocean will fail to be moved by a certain emotion. This statue is a representative of the new continent, an exponent of the new ideology, and at the same time, a protector of the American spirit that is far more formidable than a million fortresses. I have heard that this statue was a gift from France, but I think the power of the artist who created it is equal to God’s.

  Perhaps in Japan too some may be making plans for the construction of a huge monument, representing the Orient in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war. But if it is going to be carried out by the Japanese government, a government that equates artistic work with the building of roads, I must hope such a plan won’t materialize. Japan’s beauty is known and loved throughout the world not through the statues of Kusunoki Masashige [a fourteenth-century warrior] or Saigô Takamori [a nineteenth-century figure], not through the brick buildings in Hibiya [in Tokyo], but through cherry blossoms scattering like clouds or geisha dancing like butterflies. So our mission as Orientals is not to be drunk with the dreamlike illusion of harmonizing East and West, as someone suggests, but to turn the whole island nation into a pleasure center of the world, with all our men devoting themselves to growing flowers and all our women becoming dancing girls.