American Stories

by Nagai Kafu

  Baudelaire says—to be intoxicated, this is the only question. If you want to avoid feeling the horrible weight of Time that presses on your shoulders and bows you to the ground, you must not hesitate to get drunk. Whether with liquor, poetry, morality, or whatever, it does not matter. If at times you awaken from your intoxication on the steps of a palace, on the grass of a valley, or in a desolate room, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, or the clocks, anything that flies, moves, revolves, sings, talks, what time it is. The wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, the clocks will answer, it is the time to be intoxicated, it does not matter whether with liquor, poetry, morality, or anything; if you do not want to become miserable slaves of Time, you must be intoxicated all the time. . . .25

  All around me, night had fallen. The woods were dark, the sky was dark, the water was dark. But I remained on the bench, watching the shadows of the leaves scatter against the electric lights shining among the trees.

  (New York, October 1906)

  Chronicle of Chinatown

  There are times when I feel happy beyond reason, strange even to myself, just by looking at the clear blue sky; as a reaction, however, sometimes I find myself suddenly in deep despair without any reason or cause.

  For instance, on a chilly, rainy evening, when I happen to hear the voices of people talking beyond the wall or the meowing of a cat, I feel like crying, gritting my teeth, or I am tormented by all kinds of sinister fantasies, as if I wanted all of a sudden to pierce my heart with an ice pick and kill myself or to throw myself into the depth of an indescribably frightful vice or degradation.

  Once I am in this state of mind, everything becomes topsy-turvy so that what has seemed beautiful, to the world and to me, begins to look not only meaningless but also loathsome and hateful, while what has appeared ugly and evil impresses me as even more beautiful and mysterious than flowers or poems. All crimes and evil deeds now appear grander and more powerful than any moral good, and I feel like praising them from the bottom of my heart.

  So just as people go to the theater or a concert, when evening comes I wish for a truly dark night without stars and without the moon, and throughout the night, driven by an irresistible passion, I wander in search of dead men, beggars, people dying in the street, or anything else that looks ugly, sad, and frightening.

  Thus, I have been to just about every slum, every disreputable place in New York; however, alas, nothing seems to fulfill my dreadful desires better than the tenement houses of Chinatown, which are most detested and feared. Yes, Chinatown—its seamy tenement houses. This is the place that exhibits the ultimate in human depravity, an exhibition hall of vice, shame, disease, and death. . . .

  I always take the subway and get off at the small station just before the Brooklyn Bridge; this area contains rows of wholesalers and warehouses, and after the hustle and bustle of the day is over, not a single person passes by; in the night sky, which is barely spared pitch darkness by the city lights at each street corner, boxlike buildings with neither windows nor gable roofs stand tall and alone. Those accustomed only to the lively evenings of central Broadway must be surprised that such a desolate place should exist in New York. Empty packing boxes are piled up mountain-high by the roadside, and many carts separated from their horses are cast loose; once you pick your way through them, you are already at the edge of the slums, beginning with Italian immigrants’ quarters; to the left is a wide vacant lot with a row of benches, and to the right, a series of little houses with crooked roofs. As I continue on the bumpy paved road and climb up a gentle slope, I know at once that I have come to the main street of Chinatown by the unpleasant smell of the place.

  Chinatown consists of a very small area, with the main street overlooking at a distance the tracks of the elevated trains; it divides into two winding roads lined with houses, but they converge once again into the main street. Those who come here for the first time must feel creepy about the way the bumpy paved road winds its way seemingly without end. The houses are all American-style brick buildings, but the various gilded signboards, hanging lanterns, and pasted notices on red Chinese paper put out on the doorways of numerous restaurants, general stores, and greengroceries, combined with the ugly row of houses of uneven heights and doorways, create a certain harmony for the whole scene that is unmistakably, gloomily Chinese.

  At night, when the noisy sound of gongs from Chinese plays is heard from the end of an alley and the hanging lanterns of the restaurants are lit all at once, Chinese men who have been working far away during the day in various parts of the city steadily congregate, each with a long pipe in his mouth, and are engrossed in roadside conversations about lotteries and gambling; this scene must strike foreigners26 as quite strange, for swindlers, always quick to see an opportunity, bring curious men and women from distant uptown in a sightseeing automobile with a huge sign saying CHINA TOWN [sic] BY NIGHT—and there are also those who come in fine carriages, accompanied by prostitutes from the Broadway area, to spend the evening at a Chinese restaurant out of curiosity.

  This, however, is just the surface of Chinatown. Once you go behind its restaurants, stores, and other buildings, you will find four-or five-story buildings standing straight like walls, each crowding around a small yard paved with stone and with dirty laundry hanging from its windows.

  It is to one of these buildings that I go late at night, stealthily . . . it is a tenement house subdivided like a beehive.

  To get into this place, you have no choice but to pass through the small front yard, but its stone pavement is littered with waste paper and rags thrown down from all the windows, which cling to your feet like snakes, and the sewage flowing out of the public toilet at the corner, which is enclosed with boards, sometimes forms a pool too large to hop over. From a row of tin trash cans placed along the buildings’ walls the stench from rapidly decaying objects unbearably pollutes the air, which cannot be ventilated out of this area. So once you set foot in this place, even before you take a look into the buildings in the back, you sink into a sensation as if you had been totally separated from your daily life, just as you do when you smell the burning incense inside a temple and are struck by the place’s solemnity, although these are two sharply contrasting circumstances.

  There are occasions when a momentary sight gives such a strong impression that it will almost stay with you for the rest of your life. . . . One clear winter night, if I remember correctly, as I sneaked into this place, as usual like a criminal in hiding, pulling down my hat over my eyes and turning up the collar of my overcoat, I noticed a large half moon in the narrow winter sky, visible between the buildings. Its dull red coloring could have been compared to that of a woman’s eyes swollen from crying. Its dim light glided down the sides of the dirty buildings and cast an indescribably ghastly shadow on a corner of the far distant yard. There was light escaping from the doorways and windows with drawn curtains, but not a voice could be heard. Suddenly a big black cat, appearing from I knew not where, looked up above the boards of the public toilet and, raising its back high, turned its face toward the sadly falling moon, meowed once, twice, three times, and then vanished like a ghost. I had never felt so tormented by fathomless superstition. . . .

  On another occasion, on a summer night, the walls on all sides had been in the sun all day long and not only did not cool off easily but shut out the breeze so that inside the yard it felt like a pot full of oil. The warm repulsive smell from the overflowing sewage stifled one’s breathing like a visible fume, but the stuffiness inside the tiny rooms in the buildings must be even worse, for half-naked women were thrusting their bodies outside the completely open windows, almost turning themselves upside down. Bright light streamed out over their shoulders so that, entirely unlike in the winter, the color of the night that fell on the yard was bright and shiny. From the windows facing each other, ear-splitting voices of women resounded, cursing or chatting, but higher up, in the attic of a building, one heard the creaking of a kokin [harp], perhaps being play
ed by a Chinese, which set one’s teeth on edge . . . repeating a monotonous Oriental tune endlessly as if paying no attention to such cacophony. As I stood still for a moment, exhausted by the foul smell and heat around me, and listened half consciously, I felt, oh! what harmony, what unity! I had never heard a piece of music that sang of people’s ruin and downfall in such a heart-rending way. . . .

  At the very end of the yard is an entrance without a door. Right inside is a narrow staircase with remains of spittle here and there, and as you climb up fearfully, on each flight a dim, naked gaslight is on the old wall of the narrow hallway, and you are assailed powerfully by the smell of slow-cooking pork stew and green scallions as well as the scent of incense and opium; you can never smell such things anywhere else in the United States.

  All over the painted doors red Chinese pieces of paper are pasted with various Chinese characters in thick brush strokes, names such as “Li” and “Lo” or invocations of auspicious omens, and inside people are talking in Chinese, sounding like the screeching of monkeys; at some other entrances, however, with ribbons tied in bows as their signs, American women with thickly painted faces open the doors halfway as soon as they hear some footsteps in the hall, calling out in the Chinese or Japanese they have picked up.

  Poor women, they have come together in these tenement houses with only Chinese, the very people whom Americans in general consider not so much an inferior race as animals—the same way they consider a certain class of Japanese—as objects. In any human society, the distinction of winners and losers, upper and lower ranks, cannot be avoided. Even after women throw themselves away in the seas of lust, even in those seas there are some that are pure and others that are impure, and some of these women attain queenly glory and become objects of envy, while others exhibit such misery after having tried everything in vain.

  These women have exhausted all their respective dreams befitting their situations and brought only their flesh marked “female” to this abyss, having lost any sense of sorrow or happiness, desire or virtue. A sure sign of this is the fact that when they stop a man lingering at the doorway, they merely want him to give the crucial answer right away instead of using tiresome devices such as a seductive expression or suggestive gestures, as an ordinary prostitute would, in order to lure him step by step into the deep. If the man doesn’t say yes or no but tries to tease them, partly for fun, hell will break loose, and they will immediately begin howling like rabid dogs and spit out every abusive word available.

  It really seems that they are just unbearably angry with no particular cause. It is not uncommon that, when they do not find an opponent to pick a fight with, they will burn their guts by gulping down glass after glass of strong whisky and writhe on the floor loudly damning their fate, or break cups and glasses and tear their hair. Not a few, on the other hand, have already gone beyond even such a stage of madness and calmly enjoy an empty peace, holding, whenever there is a chance, an opium pipe like a lover.

  Ah, the paradise of poisonous smoke! A certain French poet called it PARADIS ARTIFICIELS [sic] (artificial paradises). To reach the stage of enjoying this dreamland, one has to endure the long journey of unusual despair, pain, and degradation, but then it is possible to escape completely the worldly ties of anguish or regret. Look at their bright eyes while they are asleep! Whenever I gaze timidly upon them, I feel an irrepressible anger at myself for lacking the courage and determination to degrade myself likewise, being held back by what is left of my conscience.

  Besides these queens of evil, empresses of sin, and princesses of corruption, there live in these tenement houses not a few who, being unable to inhabit bright, sunny places, at last find their repose under the awning of sin and evil.

  There is the old Jewish man who comes to sell various stolen items and fakes to these women who are his best customers. There is the gray-haired peddler who spends his life wandering on one journey or another, holding his livelihood in the small box hanging from his shoulders. There is the black woman who makes a living by shoplifting and sells these goods from place to place at bargain prices. There is the orphaned, homeless delinquent boy who runs errands for the whores like the “errand boy” in the pleasure quarters of Japan. But among these people the most pitiful and frightful are the pack of homeless old women whose lives are uncertain even this evening, let alone tomorrow.

  We prematurely conclude that the plight of those prostitutes is the ultimate depth of human degradation, but there are those lower than even the lowest. Alas, how often and how much do people have to endure ill fate in order to reach the ultimate ruin, the ultimate peace!

  Their twisted bodies are barely covered with rags, their eyes resemble rotten oysters and discharge mucus, their disheveled white hair looks like shredded cotton yarn as if it has been preserved for the sake of lice; they take refuge from the elements in the corners of the tenements’ hallways, under the floors, or behind the public toilets, and sometimes they officiously do the laundry and other chores for the whores in order barely to scrape a living. But they seem to believe that this is ultimately more comfortable and freer than society’s constraints called charity or prisons called old people’s homes; if they foresee that there is a chance of a policeman’s footsteps being heard in this hole, they disappear with amazing alacrity, but otherwise they are wont to roam the world and, under cover of the night, make the rounds of the whores’ rooms here and there to beg for money. Even the women are no match for them. If they beat or kick them in a fit of temper, they may die on the spot, but if they push them out of the door just a little, they may wail loudly all night or collapse nastily right there and start snoring. One time I heard these harassing words:

  “OK, if you are so mean, I won’t ask for your kindness anymore. But soon you too are going to learn your lesson when you’ve run out of luck. . . . You think you are still young and will be able to do your business as much as you want, but in no time you’re going to be like me. Don’t even bother to look in the mirror; the poison you’ve been taking in, who knows for how long, is going to gush out at one point. Don’t pay attention to your wrinkles, it’s your hair you should worry about. Your nose’ll shrink, your hands’ll get crooked and start shaking. And you’ll get cramps in your legs, and you’ll be bent in the back. Here’s proof . . . just look at my hands. . . .”

  The woman who was doing her face for the night in front of a mirror uttered a cry in spite of herself and, covering her face with both hands, lay prostrate on her bed. The old hag of a beggar laughed in a creepy way and, bidding her farewell, came out of the woman’s room into the hall; I had been peeping in the doorway but became suddenly frightened and fled from the spot in a hurry.

  All of this reminds me of the poem, LES PETITES VIEILLES [sic] [The little old women], which Baudelaire dedicated to Victor Hugo, in which he exclaims, “Ruines! ma famille! ô cerveaux congénères! (Devastation, my family! Congeneric brains!)27

  Oh, I love Chinatown. Chinatown is a treasure house of poetic material for “the flowers of evil.” I am constantly concerned lest so-called humanitarianism and charity should wipe away this world of its own from a corner of society.

  Night Stroll

  I am fond of nighttime in the city. I love its brightly lit quarters.

  As you well know, I preferred twilight in Ginza or an evening at Yoshiwara to the moon of Hakone or the waves of Ôiso, and stayed alone at my house in Tokyo even during the summer, rather than going to a resort.

  So it goes without saying that since my arrival in New York, the evenings of this great city on the new continent, where there is no place without bright lights, have given me so much pleasure. Oh, New York is an amazing nightless city. It is a bright, dazzling, and magical world of electric lights that must be very hard to imagine in Japan.

  Once the sun sets and night comes, I leave home almost unconsciously. If I don’t see the world lit by those glittering lights, be they in the streets, at street corners, in the theaters, restaurants, train stations, hotels,
dance halls, or anywhere else, I am so lonesome and sad that I become despondent as if I had been separated from life. The colors of the lights have really become necessities of life for me.

  Not just instinctively but also intellectually, I am fond of these colors. They are red like blood, pure like gold, and at times blue like crystal; how such colors, and such luster, arouse an exquisite sensation! Nothing, not even the charm of a beautiful woman’s deep blue eyes or the brilliant luster of precious stones, comes close to them.

  To my young romantic eyes, the lights appear as the symbol of humans’ every desire, happiness, and pleasure. At the same time, they also seem to suggest that we have the power to go against God’s will, to oppose the laws of nature. It is these lights that save us from the darkness of night and awaken us from the sleep of death. Are these lights not the manmade sun, flowers of sin that mock God and boast of knowledge?

  Ah, that is why this world that has obtained and is shone upon by lights is a world of enchantment. Because of these lights, women of shameful trade appear more beautiful than chaste wives or virtuous virgins, a thief ’s face is as tragic as the Savior’s, and a rake’s mien is as noble as a king’s. The poet of depravation incapable of singing of God’s glory or the immortality of the soul has, for the first time and thanks to the lights, found beauty—in sin and darkness. Baudelaire’s verse goes: