American Stories

by Nagai Kafu

  The steamship carrying me sailed away into the vast open sea, rendering the beach scenes unrecognizable, but then it shifted course and moved along the quiet coastline. The summer’s bright sunlight permeates the clear blue sky and shines upon the pure white peaks of the clouds floating over the horizon, the smooth sea, and the trees along the waterfront with branches thick with leaves, adding indescribably pleasant luster to the white of the clouds, the deep blue of the water, and the green of the leaves. As we look around, the coastal area is a stretch of low-lying ground like a meadow, and the surface of the water is often interrupted by sandbanks with tall, overgrown reeds, behind which immaculately white sails of yachts glide past, while a flock of seagulls fly like scattering blossoms. What a joy it is to stumble upon such a small-scale landscape, just like a watercolor painting, in an unfamiliar place; it exceeds anything one encounters in world-renowned tourist spots or historical landmarks.

  Last year, when I passed through the Rocky Mountains and Niagara Falls, I was not as moved by these world-famous sites as I had expected, while by contrast, I was unforgettably touched, poetically inspired by a Missouri village buried under fallen leaves or by a Michigan orchard’s twilight—these celebrated mountains and majestic waters, gathering together nature’s engineering, have long marveled and awed people, and may be likened to Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante’s Divine Comedy, while the twilight scenes at those obscure villages are just like poems of unrequited love by an unknown poet. It is said that Tolstoy was more moved by the evening singing of muThiks [serfs] than by Beethoven’s music, that George Eliot preferred a little Dutch painting to the famous masterpieces of antiquity; so it might not be totally because of my lack of learning that I find small pieces by Turgenev or Maupassant more interesting than the grand epics of the classical period that have become trifling objects of experts and scholars.

  After making two or three stops at piers of smaller beaches, the steamship arrived at a similar summer resort called Pleasant Bay. The lowland in the whole beach area had been made into a park, in which there were small music halls, restaurants, and rolling-ball parlors amid trees. From here it takes a little over one hour by train to reach our destination, Asbury Park, and all along the way is an uninterrupted stretch of summer hotels, summer rentals, and meadows with cool-looking clumps of trees.

  Young sisters stretch themselves out on a hammock hung from maple trees in their little garden and are reading novels; a young couple sits in armchairs placed side by side on a veranda overhung with vivid green leaves, chatting happily to each other while looking out on the street; young lovers are returning home along the iron-fenced road with flowers they have picked in the meadow; clusters of young girls are holding each other’s hands, running around, singing songs; several groups of good-looking boys are visiting their friend at the front door across from the flower garden; and everywhere there are pleasant laughter, voices, whistling, and the sound of piano-playing.

  Indeed, on such a clear, bright summer day, and with such an agreeable sea breeze, this village by the water is no hiding place for old folk disillusioned with life but a paradise for young men and women to indulge in the pleasures of youth, the idleness of youth, and the dreams of youth.

  From the moving train, I saw countless beautiful women and handsome men. Nothing makes me feel more attached to this world and makes me enjoy my own existence more than seeing beautiful women and handsome men. Just as an innocent young girl does not know, not being a scientist, if the beautiful flowers blooming in the fields are poisonous or not, so do I feel, not being a moralist or a policeman and thus incapable of judging what may lie hidden underneath the human body, be it good or evil, that every place where handsome men and beautiful women tread, laugh, and enjoy themselves is like an ideal heaven. This is the more the case because this seaside in summer is less like a heated room in a wintry city, such as a theater or a dance hall where dresses and jewels are blooming, than a village where the fragrance of thinly clad snowy bodies are filling the air.

  Men are wearing light jackets and straw hats, while women don’t even wear hats underneath their white parasols and walk in the bright sun like so many birds flying in the sky, proudly showing off their curly blond or brunette hair, displaying, from the hems of their short skirts, wrinkle-free silk stockings and charming small shoes, rolling up the sleeves of their thin waists [shirtwaists], which are almost transparent, swinging their hips, and beating time with their shoulders.

  I am the first to admit to admiring the physical beauty of Western women, the first to love everything from their most curvaceous waistlines, expressive eyes, statuelike smooth shoulders, and broad chests to their feet encased in small high-heeled shoes, and to pay the highest respects to their ingenuity in make-up and their swiftness in adapting to fashion. They skillfully choose the color and shape of their clothes to match the color of their hair, facial features, and build so that even an average-looking woman is enhanced to attract men’s attention, while in Japan, men and women seem totally deficient of this ability. It may be that the Japanese are a people accustomed to censure and meddling so that women brought up in that society are too timid and intimidated to be capable of enhancing their natural appearances.

  The train stopped at an intersection in a town overlooking the Asbury Park beach.

  The verandas of four or five tall wooden hotels facing the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, the drugstore at a corner of the intersection, the esplanade jutting out over the waves are all filled with men and women, their white clothes and parasols reflecting the blue color of the sky and the sea and producing in onlookers an indescribably pleasurable sensation.

  Sosen and I go down the steps of the esplanade to the sand by the sea and look around for a place that might rent out a swimsuit so I may immerse my five-shaku [five-foot] body, which was raised under the Far Eastern sun, for the first time in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean,22 but strangely enough, there is not one person swimming, though so many people are strolling along the sea, and no place is open for changing clothes.

  “I don’t understand it, the sea isn’t that rough,” I say, and Sosen too looks around inquiringly; but then he remembers and says, “It’s because today is Sunday.”

  There are places in the United States that forbid any kind of amusement on a Sunday for religious reasons. Asbury Park is one of them.

  A prohibition! Regulations! Nothing looks more foolish than formal rules promulgated by religion. Do they really think there is sufficient religious significance in going to church on Sunday, singing hymns, and praying? Are these enough to help solve life’s riddles?23

  Sosen told me that there are certain towns in this state with a ludicrous contradiction, which forbids all amusement on Sundays but allows the driving of carriages and automobiles.

  The two of us sat on the sand and spent a little time gazing at the infinite ocean where only clouds floated, and after a while we returned to the esplanade; after quenching our thirst with a glass of lemonade, we decided to go back to Pleasant Bay Park where we had disembarked and take a nap till the return boat was due, and jumped onto the approaching train.

  After getting off at the entrance to the park, we walked to a shady spot under the trees at the edge of the water and sat on the soft green grass. The scenery before our eyes reminded me of nothing as much as a peaceful Dutch painting, with roofs and windmills of farmhouses peeking out from among the low stretch of summer trees, across the calm inlet that reflects the shadows of white summer clouds.

  I somehow felt inexplicably happy and, lounging on the grass, I took out a cigarette from my pocket and had a smoke; when I looked toward the quiet surface of the water, there was a pure white boat in the middle of the lake-like inlet, which had made its appearance I knew not when. It looked like Lohengrin’s white swan, which alighted unexpectedly from midair. But there seemed to be only two people aboard, a young woman and a young man, the latter rowing with all his might so that the boat swiftly moved away and in no
time disappeared behind the sand bank where reeds protruded. Simultaneously, I too threw myself back flat on the grass as if I were lying down on my bed; my eyes were then at the same level as the surface of the water, and it felt as though the brimming sea were in no time going to soak me, while the summer sky glimpsed behind the green maple leaves seemed even higher and wider than usual, in sharp contrast to the floating white clouds, which appeared to be slowly descending to envelope me. With what joy did I wait for it to happen, with what should I compare the sensation of being surrounded by a haziness as if hidden in a mist, with only a breeze occasionally coming this way over the surface of the water, gently lapping my face, so that my entire body, all its bones and flesh, melted into vapor, leaving only the fragile skin that was like silk and sensitive to everything, enabling me to float between the full-bodied water and the languid clouds, more lightly than fish or birds . . . ah, what a daydream!

  When I was back home, I used to think nothing was as refined as an afternoon nap on a summer day in a small room overlooking a small garden where safflowers blossomed, while listening to the sound of a wind bell outside the reed screen; or at a geisha house by the river where the sound of samisen could be heard far away; but away from home, I find that it is an even more charming and simply indescribable experience to lie down on the luxuriant wild grass under the immense sky of this foreign land.

  When I was living in a remote rural community in Michigan, it was exactly at the end of May, in the middle of spring in this northern country, that fresh leaves of huge maple, elm, and oak trees thickly enveloped the village; apple, peach, and cherry blossoms bloomed in the orchards climbing up the hill, as did purple lilacs, white snowballs, and red roses in the tiny yards of people’s houses. Robins and blackbirds that leave the south and flock to this place in spring and summer keep singing carefree songs at the top of their lungs, in yards, cemeteries, towns, villages, wherever trees and flowers are blooming. It continues to be sunny during the day, as is often the case on a continent, and the strong sunlight reminds one of the July heat in Japan. I decide to take a break from my small room and walk along the train tracks amid the small hills rising from the edge of the village and gradually wander into the uninhabited oak woods. As I fling myself onto the wild grass resplendent with white daisies and golden buttercups, numerous squirrels, startled by the sound, scuttle in all directions on the grass and, promptly jumping from one oak treetop to another, begin to squeak.

  As usual, I brought a collection of poems in my pocket, but before mysterious nature, any painting, any poem seems but a grotesque exaggeration, at times even a total falsehood, and I no longer desire to touch any such artificial object. Rather, I stretch myself out to my heart’s content, and as I look at the sky beyond the tall treetops, smell the scent of moist soil and grass, and listen intently to the singing of birds or the squeaking of squirrels, I feel as if I had completely renounced the world, or been renounced by it. In Japan, where even in remote mountainous villages land is almost everywhere cultivated, one feels the din and bustle of the world, but, as can be expected, in the vast American continent, everywhere there is such an uninhabited area just two miles outside a town; in addition, my own subjective sentiment of solitude in a foreign land gives me an inexplicable sense of pathos and beauty as I watch the luxuriant foliage, the flowing water, and the clouds sailing across the sky, and wild fantasies well up in my mind, imagining, in view of the chilly pleasures of a wandering life, how it would be if I rode a camel in the desert side by side with an Arabian woman and slept with her under a tent, or, in contrast, if I fell ill on my journey and became bedridden in a back alley where the sun never shone. . . . At this I shudder in spite of myself and wonder if I should not go back to Japan tomorrow; I am driven from one extreme thought to another and eventually fall into a confused dream, emotionally exhausted.

  Oh! Daydreaming in a foreign land! It was these dreams that gave my monotonous life an unlimited charm I had never experienced. Today, as usual, I lay down by Pleasant Bay, into which the tides of the Atlantic Ocean flow, and heard in my dream the sound of some exquisite music; I then awoke with a start and realized that at the restaurant at the end of the park, a band was beginning to play some quiet classical piece.

  But I was still in a state of torpor after my nap and casually fixed my gaze upon the scenery in front of me, from the bay to the woods and the clouds, as if viewing a place I had visited more than ten years earlier; then, hearing footsteps behind me, I turned around and found Sosen. He told me that he too had just awakened and had been to the pier to check the schedule for our return trip.

  The two of us left the shaded area and, after stopping at the park restaurant where music was playing to quench our thirst with chilled fruit and ginger ale, we boarded the ship past five o’clock in the evening.

  The sun set in the west while we were on board, enabling us to enjoy thoroughly the view of the Atlantic Ocean aglow, and by the time we slowly approached New York harbor, we noticed a bright light starting to shine in the hand held high by the Statue of Liberty. This was followed by the glittering, all at once, far away beyond the high-heaving afternoon waves, of New York’s buildings reaching the sky like a mountain range, the numerous ships moored by the Brooklyn Bridge, and the row of piers; this scene was even more beautiful and seemed even more full of meaning than what we had seen in daytime.

  It was exactly eight o’clock when the steamship reached the pier; Sosen and I went to Fourteenth Street, which is particularly alive at night, to eat our dinner and entered a certain French café.

  (July 1905)

  Midnight at a Bar

  From New York’s City Hall Plaza, go past the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, which is always crowded with people and horses, and walk on Third Avenue for four or five blocks alongside the elevated train tracks, and you will come upon Chatham Square, a large and dirty intersection; to the left is the Jewish section, to the right Chinatown and then Little Italy.

  Called “Poor Alley” for short, this area is a slum inhabited by immigrants from various countries as well as laborers; it is still part of the city of New York, but in contrast to the West Side, which represents the New World and a haven for the successful, this East Side is a different world, a hiding place for those who have not yet succeeded or who have failed.

  As a result, whereas on the West Side people show off their beautiful clothes while riding the subway, here women do not even wear hats but cover their heads with dirty shawls and walk with their mouths full of food. Men wear weather-beaten hats but no shirts with collars, exposing their hairy chests through their torn undershirts; thrust whisky bottles into their trouser pockets; and walk while spitting saliva yellow with chewing tobacco everywhere.

  As a result, the surface of the sidewalks is slimy with the phlegm and saliva of these people and, besides, littered with strange, suspicious-looking waste paper, rags, and sometimes even torn women’s stockings lying limply like decomposed dead snakes. The street is everywhere paved with stone thoroughly worn by the wheels of heavy wagons, while the constantly flowing urine of packhorses fills the nooks and cracks, stagnating there in dark, muddy green.

  There are various shops on both sides of the street, and among them is a tattoo artist whose sign on the glass window—PAINLESS TATTOOING WITH ELECTRIC DEVICE—amazes you that such a thing should exist in the West. Elsewhere, here and there, and almost all in a row, one’s attention is caught by dubious-looking jewelers and secondhand clothing stores, in one of which an elderly Jewish man bent with age is restlessly watching the world from behind the poorly lit counter, while at a roadside eatery an old Italian woman is dozing off among buzzing blowflies as if she had no mercenary desires.

  It is everywhere like this; what strikes you, from the long rows of houses to the clothes people wear, is their uniformly gloomy coloration, while the air is always murky with the combined stench of meat cooked at roadside stands, sweat, and other indescribable filth, and weighs heavily on one’s hear
t. So once you set foot in this neighborhood, any idea of life’s glory and pleasure is completely obliterated, making you feel as if you were solely overcome by a gloomy nightmare.

  One day—it was a winter night. I was walking in this area aimlessly after having seen a Yiddish play in the Jewish quarter. It seemed to be already past midnight, as the secondhand clothing stores and jewelers, as well as all the other shops, had turned off their lights, with only the saloons at various street corners proudly displaying their electric lights as if to say now was their time.

  I pushed open a door and found, upon entering, a group of laborers leaning against the counter and chatting loudly, each holding a cup in one hand, but I also noticed the faint sound of a battered piano and voices of women merrymaking in the back. So I penetrated farther, and as I tried to push open the door at the end of the hall, I found my body sliding with the door into a pitch-dark corridor.

  Sensing that the women’s laughter was coming from behind a door five or six steps ahead, I moved on unhesitatingly and approached this second door, whereupon, perhaps hearing my footsteps, someone inside opened it. It was the guard who had been watching through the keyhole, and as soon as I entered, he shut the door again with a bang.