American Stories Read online

  American Stories

  Nagai Kafu

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Contents

  Cover

  American Stories Translator’s Introduction TRAVELS ABROAD

  AMERICAN STORIES

  MAJOR THEMES

  ABOUT THIS TRANSLATION

  Acknowledgments

  Night Talk in a Cabin

  A Return Through the Meadow

  Atop the Hill

  The Inebriated Beauty

  Long Hair

  Spring and Autumn

  Lodging on a Snowy Night

  In the Woods

  Bad Company

  Old Regrets

  Rude Awakening

  Ladies of the Night

  January First

  Daybreak

  Two Days in Chicago

  The Sea in Summer

  Midnight at a Bar

  Fallen Leaves

  Chronicle of Chinatown

  Night Stroll

  A June Night’s Dream

  A Night at Seattle Harbor

  Night Fog

  Notes

  A PACIFIC BASIN INSTITUTE BOOK

  American Stories is the eighth volume to be published in The Library of Japan series, a selected cross-section of modern Japanese fiction and nonfiction in translation for presentation to American readers. Produced by the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College, as part of a plan evolved under the aegis of the Japan–United States Conference on Cultural and Educational Exchange (CULCON), this series is designed to make Americans aware of the social and cultural underpinnings of modern Japan, offering works either unavailable in English translation or difficult for most general readers to obtain.

  Volumes previously published include Silk and Insight, by Mishima Yukio; The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi; Labyrinth, by Arishima Takeo; Konoe Fumimaro, A Political Biography, by Oka Yoshitake; Kokoro and Selected Essays, by Natsume Sôseki; The Spirit of Japanese Capitalism, by Yamamoto Shichihei; and Ôoka Shôhei’s Taken Captive: A Prisoner of War’s Diary. Frank Gibney and J. Thomas Rimer are the editors of the series. The editors and the publisher would like to thank the Japan Foundation for its generous support in making this publication possible.

  American Stories

  Nagai Kafû

  translated and with an introduction by Mitsuko Iriye

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for funds given by The Japan Foundation toward the cost of publishing this volume.

  Photograph of Nagai Kafû reproduced from Kafû zenshu

  (Collected works of Kafû), vol. 18 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1964).

  Nagai Kafû’s personal seal reproduced from Kafû zenshu, vol. 4

  (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1992). Used by permission of the Estate of Nagai Kafû.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since z893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  Translation copyright © 2000 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nagai, Kafû, 1879-1959.

  [Amerika monogatari. English]

  American stories / by Nagai Kafû ;

  translated and with an introduction by Mitsuko Iriye.

  p. cm. — (Modern Asian literature)

  ISBN 0-231-11790-6 (cloth)

  I. Iriye, Mitsuko. II. Title. III. Series.

  PL812.A4A8413 2000

  895.6'342—DC21 99-33508

  Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are

  printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

  Printed in the United States of America

  c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Translator’s Introduction

  Nagai Kafû (1879–1959), whose real first name was Sôkichi, was one of the major writers of modern Japan. On September 24, 1903, at the age of twenty-three, he left for the United States, and he did not return home till July 1908. He spent his last year abroad in France, mainly in Lyon, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that it was his stay in America that made a major impact on Kafû’s formative years as a writer. Yet the scarcity of his written work during this period makes it difficult to assess precisely what happened to him abroad and how his writings were intertwined with his experiences there.

  As the eldest son of a high-ranking bureaucrat turned businessman, Kafû had been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. Nagai Kyûichirô had married the daughter of his teacher, a famous Sinologist, and was himself well known for his poems written in the Chinese style. At age ten, Kafû was taught classical Chinese, but he was particularly influenced by his mother, an avid reader of popular literature and Kabuki theatergoer who collected colored woodblock prints depicting actors. She was also good at nagauta (long epic songs) and koto (Japanese harp). Through her, Kafû was drawn to the world of literature and arts of the Edo period.

  He belonged to the second generation of Japanese in the modern era, who began their careers after their country had gone through the initial and generally successful process of “modernization” following its encounter with the West. Japan had established a constitutional form of government, carried out administrative and fiscal centralization, adopted the gold standard, universalized military training, induced the Western powers to revise the “unequal treaties,” and launched ambitious programs of industrialization and mass education. In the name of “enriching the nation and strengthening the army,” Japan built up a formidable military force and fought successfully against China and, later, Russia, in the process acquiring overseas colonies as well as the coveted status of a great power. In less than half a century after the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853–54, the country had emerged as the first “modern” nation of Asia.

  Japan’s political and economic transformation had been achieved through contact with and learning from Europe and North America, but the modern transformation had not necessarily meant the Westernization of Japanese culture, such as literature, music, and fine art. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that the country’s values, mental habits, and tastes were subtly changing as more and more Japanese came into contact with Westerners and their ideas and arts. It was natural, then, that the intellectuals of Kafû’s generation should have become fascinated by the implications of modernization for Japan’s cultural life and for the mental and psychological identity of the individual. Underneath the surface glamour of treaty revision and military victories, Japanese writers, artists, and musicians were beginning their long and serious quest for meaning. Each sought to find his or her own point of connection between Japan and the West. The sum total of these quests made up Japanese consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century. Among those who grappled with the problem of Japanese-Western relations in the field of literature, Nagai Kafû is significant not only because many of his writings reflect his self-conscious encounter with Western (in particular, French) literature but, more fundamentally, because his experiences and perspectives were among the most unique and sophisticated of that time.

  Kafû’s interest in literature intensified during his years at a middle school. At this time, he even began visiting the pleasure quarters of Tokyo. The school, whose principal was the founder of the jûdô hall, Kôdôkan, was known for its stress on martial values, something Kafû did not appreciate. Upon graduation from the school at age eighteen, he tried, and failed, the entrance examination for the prestigious First Higher School, known as a preparatory academy for future bureaucrats, lawyers, and businessmen as well as scholars. He then spent three months in Shanghai with his father, who was sent there as branch manager of the Japan Steamship Company. At the end of 1897 Kafû returned to Japan and enro
lled in the Chinese language department of the Tokyo Foreign Language School. However, he hardly attended his classes and instead immersed himself in the lifestyle of a typical late Edo dilettante: writing short stories; frequenting the pleasure quarters, yose (variety halls), and the Kabuki theater; and taking shakuhachi (bamboo flute) and samisen lessons. He also had an equally brief stint as an apprentice Kabuki playwright.

  In September 1898 Kafû showed a short story he had written to Hirotsu Ryûrô (1861–1928), a popular writer at that time who belonged to Ken’yûsha, the first modern literary society in Japan (founded in 1895). But unlike the mainstream of this group led by its founder, Ozaki Kôyô, Ryûrô had started writing so-called “serious novels” dealing with the darker and pathetic aspects of life, particularly the demimonde. For this reason, and also because his style stressed dialogue rather than the mixed gaTokubun (colloquial-literary style) of Kôyô and others, Kafû decided to become Ryûrô’s literary disciple.

  It was also around this time that Kafû began his long association with Western literature, both in Japanese translation (frequently not straightforward translations but adaptations of foreign works) and in English. Upon reading Ueda Bin’s account of French literature in a book entitled Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art (1900), Kafû felt a strong affinity with the French literary world and began to study the language. He attended French language classes in the evening division of Gyôsei High School while simultaneously reading French works in English, such as Ernest Vizetelli’s fine translations of Emile Zola’s novels from the Rougon-Macquart series. As a result, Kafû became a leading advocate of Zola and his naturalism, and continued to be profoundly influenced by the French writer’s descriptive skills even after he came to claim that his “Zolaesque” phase had been but a youthful aberration.

  By the time Kafû was twenty-three (1903), then, he was already known as a promising writer with several fairly well-received novels of middle length in addition to a series of trial pieces he had written as a self-appointed apprentice to Ryûrô. At a time when writers were generally held in low esteem, however, young Kafû’s literary achievements did not impress his father, who had wanted to see his son become a bureaucrat. He settled for what many well-to-do fathers did at that time: sending his son to the United States in order to acquire enough prestige as a kichôsha (a person who has returned from abroad, more specifically from the West) so that he could eventually become a respectable businessman. It was in such circumstances that Kafû left Japan. He was a dropout from an elitist course, now being sent on a face-saving journey to a faraway land, with quite an uncertain future ahead of him.

  TRAVELS ABROAD

  Kafû’s first year in the United States was spent primarily in Tacoma, Washington, with occasional visits to Seattle. For a brief period of time he attended classes at a local high school to improve his English; however, being a boarder at the home of the branch manager of a firm founded by a successful Japanese businessman (who was an acquaintance of Kafû’s father) in a predominantly Japanese neighborhood did not help in this regard. He had hoped to live with an American family but could not, due to racial discrimination against Chinese and Japanese. Attending classes from time to time was not a pleasant experience, since he felt more than a little discomfort at having to study with American schoolchildren who were considerably younger. Confused and unable to adjust to the new life, he gave up the idea of writing novels of any length and instead concentrated on reading books and magazines sent to him from Japan. He also read some American and French works, but he was far more interested in the latter. Edgar Allan Poe was an exception, partly because Kafû’s favorite French poet, Baudelaire, was fascinated by this American poet. But otherwise Kafû formed a low opinion of the American authors he read.

  His sweeping castigation of contemporary American literature may have been a result of his acquaintance with only a few novels published in the United States at that time. Of one of them, John Fox, Jr.’s The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903), a hodgepodge of bits from Oliver Twist, The Little Princess, and the Bible, Kafû had this to say:

  American novels are too naive and optimistic, nothing even remotely like French or Russian writings. The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, which has been a best-seller, was heralded by critics as a pure American novel. It is a success story that deals with a young boy from the mountains who makes it big after a great deal of hardship. Indeed, a typically “pure American novel.” The American people who shun profound thought and set their souls and hearts in quest of worldly success are quite well described in this novel. The United States is extremely inconvenient and unsuitable for a person like myself who wants to study literature.1

  Part of the concluding passage of the novel went:

  Once again he was starting his life over afresh, with his old capital, a strong body and a stout heart. In his breast still burned the spirit that had led his race to the land, had wrenched it from savage and from king, had made it the high temple of Liberty for the worship of free men—the Kingdom Come for the oppressed of the earth—and, himself the unconscious Shepherd of that Spirit, he was going to help carry its ideals across a continent Westward to another sea and on—who knows—to the gates of the rising sun.2

  This passage conveys the novel’s general tone, and it is easy to understand why Kafû would have recoiled from such a display of the ever healthy and optimistic, even naive, American attitude—including the urge to cross the Pacific and lead Japan to a life of spirituality.

  In October 1904 Kafû visited the World’s Fair at St. Louis, then proceeded to Kalamazoo, Michigan, in mid-November to enroll in Kalamazoo College as an “unclassified student” (auditor) in order to study English literature and the French language. (His original intention had been to go to New Orleans to meet French people and practice his French, but he had been dissuaded by the climate.) Kalamazoo is a peaceful, quiet town even today, and it is almost inconceivable that an overly urbanized young man from Tokyo should have chosen to stay in such a place. Kalamazoo College, a Baptist institution, exuded a religious atmosphere, and even the biweekly meetings of one of its literary circles that Kafû joined, the Century Forum, opened with devotional exercises. The chaplain of this group was Katô Katsuji, a very serious and hard-working student of religion who was the only other male student from Japan at that time. Kafû, whose maternal grandmother and mother had both been baptized, had been accustomed to foreign missionaries visiting his family home. But the infatuation (which proved to be rather temporary) of several young Japanese writers with Christianity had struck him as rather superficial, and the “holier-than-thou” attitude of some famous Japanese Christians had annoyed him to such an extent that he had satirized this phenomenon in one of his mid-length novels, Flowers of Hell, published just before he went to the United States.

  For a time, Kafû settled down in Kalamazoo and attended classes in elementary French and English literature. He started writing again, something he had almost abandoned while on the West Coast. At the same time, he extensively read Flaubert, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Daudet, and other French authors and felt all the more drawn toward France and its culture. Desperately wanting to go to France, in the summer of 1905 he worked as a messenger boy at the Japanese legation in Washington to earn some money. The job was offered to him through Nagai Shôzô, a cousin who was a diplomat stationed in New York. As Japanese diplomatic affairs expanded during the war with Russia, Kafû was able to hold his job till early October, but then he returned to Kalamazoo, having failed to obtain another job for the rest of the year. Within a few weeks, however, he received a letter from his father informing him that a position as a bank clerk at the New York office of the Yokohama Specie Bank had been secured for him. Kafû worked at the bank till July 1907, all the while trying to persuade his father to let him travel to France. Finally, the bank manager told Kafû that he had been appointed to a position at the Lyon branch of the bank. Kafû’s father had, once again, been instrumental in arranging his transf
er. Yet Kafû’s stay in France was to be rather short. After only eight months in Lyon, he could no longer bear to work at such a job and decided to resign his position. He moved to Paris, spent two months there, and returned to Japan in July 1908, never to go abroad again.

  American Stories was published within a few months, and it was followed by a succession of mid-length novels, short stories, and essays. Among the best known of Kafû’s novels are Sumidagawa [The river Sumida, 1909], Reishô [Sneers, 19o9], Udekurabe [Rivalry, 1918], OkameTasa [Dwarf bamboo, 192o], Ameshôshô [Quiet rain, 1921], and Bokutô kidan [A strange tale in the east of the river Sumida, 1937]. Kafû also wrote a number of pieces of literary criticism and translated French poems; some of the translations were included in a book published in 1913, Sangoshû [Coral anthology].

  During the war years (1937–45), Kafû continued to write, but without any prospect of getting his work published. He lost his home and all his library to the great fire caused by the U.S. incendiary bombing of Tokyo in March 1945. He was forced to lead a nomadic life till 1948, staying with his friends and relatives. But after the war and till his death in April 1959 at the age of seventy-nine, he was very popular and prolific. Among his postwar publications were his diaries, which he started keeping in 1917. These are considered among the most important literary works of modern Japan, as well as one of the main sources for the study of this period.

  AMERICAN STORIES