Customer Reviews

American Stories

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Well, if there were 'pleasure quarters' anywhere, young Nagai Kafu would have found them! Readers of Kafu's later novellas will know that his principal characters were often geishas and their 'unlicensed' competitors in the seedy pleasure quarters of Meiji Japan. (The period, roughly, between the American forced-opening and the onset of WW2). Likewise, in this translation of "America Monogatori", dens of vice and prostitution are the backdrops for many of Kafu's travel impressions, whether in Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, or Madison WI.

Visiting New York's Chinatown, near Brooklyn Bridge in 1906 0r 07, Kafu becomes almost lyrical in his 'nostalgia de boue" - his obsession with decadence of the sort celebrated by his favorite French poets, Baudelaire and Verlaine. Staring at a drugged, unconscious crone (once a 'woman of easy virtue', now a beggar), Kafu writes: "Whenever I gaze timidly upon them, I feel an irrepressible anger at myself for lacking the courgae and determination to degrade myself likewise, being held back by what is left of my conscience."

Kafu was 23 years old when he arrived in America in 1903. He spent four years in America, writing very little - some twenty stories/essays and about seventy letters home - before continuing his travel to France. This collection of 21 impressions and anecdotes was published in Japan in 1908. The sketches are not in chronological or thematic order; Kafu jumps freely from his first days in Seattle to his last days on Staten island... and then back to Seattle. If there is a master-plan to the organization of "American Stories", it's too subtle for me, except for the fact that the pieces get markedly better toward the end. It's as if Kafu had decided to save his best for last, a decision that might cause some readers to abandon the book too soon. I might even suggest starting in the middle of the book.

Journals of travel by Europeans through the "inscrutable west", the United States of America, were best-sellers in the 19th C, on both sides of the Atlantic. Tocqueville, Mrs. Trollope, and Dickens come to mind. Such accounts are especially interesting to historians these days, providing perspectives and insights in American culture than Americans were too busy or too reticent to record about themselves. Most such travel reports were written by mature, established authors. Kafu was neither mature nor established when he came. He was not the typical Asian immigrant laborer by any means; he came with education and money, and his class consciousness made him highly vulnerable to insult at being 'lumped' with ignorant, unwashed villagers merely because of his complexion. Kafu was in fact quite a snob, both about class and about race, and in regards to race he was the perfect prototype of the dilemma of both Japanese and Chinese immigrants/travelers to America, who found themselves in a "kiss up, kick down" world, white to the blacks, blacks to the whites. Kafu waxes rhapsodic in some of his descriptions of the beauty and freedom of white American women, but although he chastises America for its treatment of the descendants of slaves, he often refers to those descendants as physically ugly and repulsive.

On the whole, Kafu reveals a great more about himself, and by extension about Meiji Japan, than he does about America in the first decade of the 20th Century. A reader should know that, I think, before picking this book up. Some of the ambiguities and incongruities Kafu offers can be quite amusing. At one point, for instance, he exclaims in wonder at the bright lights and bustle of New York, and laments that such an animated scene could not be imagined in Tokyo; anyone who has visited the modern Ginza would have to laugh out loud at that perception.

Ambiguity is Kafu's blood and lymph. America - or rather what he sees as America - both inspires and repulses him. East and West are utterly incompatible in his mind. Watching an American friend socializing easily with his new wife, Kafu remembers his own abusive, rigid father and his subservient, depressed mother. He writes: "...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." Any reader familiar with Kafu's later works, which became angrily critical of the westernization and commercialization of Japanese life, will be flabbergasted by such 'youthful' optimism.

But then, what does Kafu suppose to be the future of Japan? In another essay, he writes: "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." Huh! So much for militarism and 'bushido'!

The traveler Kafu was a naive puppy by any standard, as focused on his own navel as any backpack-hippy traveler of more recent times. His 'monogatori' are hardly more insightful or well-written than the letters home of half-baked, somewhat spoiled Americans abroad today. Really, it's only the uniqueness of Kafu's perspective and the significance of Kafu's later literary brilliance that make this collection worth reading. Kafu's Japan, with its 1000-year cultural heritage, was as pubescent in many ways as Kafu himself, a land frozen in the historical adolescence of feudalism by its self-imposed isolation. Small wonder that Kafu's travels took him to the 'pleasure quarters' time and again; he was psychologically a randy teenage boy. There are, nevertheless, four or five pieces in this book that are gloriously written and as distinctive as the patterns of a Japanese kimono or an ikebana flower arrangement.

Nagai Kafû's stories give a lively, sometimes poetic, but always realistic picture of the US society at the beginning of the 20th century with its unlimited freedom, black poverty, abject vulgarity, deep racism and big opportunities and opportunism. As in his Japanese works, Nagai Kafû is a master in evocating the moods in the red-light districts with its evil dens and the tawdry make-ups of the ladies of the night.

Freedom (for the best and the worst)
`The US is a country where you can see both the best and the worst in society. It is perfectly possible to indulge in an opium den-induced dream, resting one's head on the shoulder of a naked beauty in a clandestine club, or to experience a religious life in the country listening morning and night to the tolling of church bells.'

Contrast with Japan (freedom of women)
`In America, unlike Japan, there are no unfair regulations explicitly prohibiting female students from reading novels.'
In the households, the living conditions as a wife were just terrible: `My father would indulge in the pleasure of drinking with his friends and assail my mother... my father's face (was) vicious and autocratic and my mother's sad, lethargic, accustomed to blind obedience.'

Poverty
As one of the ladies of the night says, `how can you live on a measly wage? It was like living for the sake of not dying. I slipped into a shameful life.' Nagai Kafû's cynically concludes: `There is not a country as morally corrupt as the US. Because of the difficulties of earning a living, it can be said that there isn't a single chaste woman.'

Vulgarity
It is the time of spitting tobacco, of pimps and kidnapped or smuggled women. A man summarizes his life as follows: `I work, drink, eat, and buy women. So I won't have any brain power left to think about my own future. I just try to use my body like a beast.'

Racism
There is open racism against Afro-Americans (`Why are N. so despised and hated by whites? Is it simply that fifty years ago they were slaves?'), and against the Chinese and Japanese (`Since it is the Japanese and Chinese who sell their labor for the cheapest wages and steadily encroach upon their territory, Japs must be among the laborer's most hated enemies.'

Ladies of the night
As Nagai Kafû states: `Is there anything more delicious than a forbidden fruit?', because for him, `love is a vagabond'.
But, what he doesn't want, are `the cold puppets of morality', and also not the women of a mercantile nation: `She'd be yours if you paid her.' `It'd be so businesslike.' `Don't be so choosy. Remember, this is America.'
There must be some kind of a friendly relationship, not a brief encounter.

Nagai Kafû is also a master psychologist (`What you sense as a child will stay with you for the rest of your life.')

The short stories in this bundle, one of the first publications of the author, are already brilliantly written pieces about the way of the world. They give a more or less brutal picture of the struggle for survival in the beginning of the 20th century in the US.

A must read for all fans of world literature and of Nagai Kafû.

This book was written by a Japanese man who lived and studied in the United states just after 1900. He stayed in various places around the country such as the state of Washington, Kalamazoo, and New York, among others. His writing was some of the first in its time to shed light on actual American life to Japanese readers, who tended to idealize America as a perfect country (the Meiji period was an era of learning from other cultures in Japan). Kafu's writing shows the darkness of early modern American racism, prostitution, and poverty, and places it in beautifully eerie settings. It is sometimes made to offend and outrage readers. I found it to be extremely interesting to see America from an immigrant's point of view in a time when so many people were flooding into the States.

I generally find Nagai Kafu's fiction pretty interesting despite my usual tastes in literature. His lifelong fascination with the seedier side of life would turn me off if he were a lesser writer, but somehow he invests all of this with a melancholy lyricism while all the same not whitewashing or trivializing his subject matter. And with this excellent series of semi-autobiographical short stories Nagai, a fledging writer no less, has already got the knack for this balancing act, only here he's not roaming Asakusa or the Tokyo brothels but rather the back allies of New York or the immigrant slums of Seattle. It is fascinating both to see Nagai treat his familiar themes in an unfamiliar setting and to see turn-of-the-(last)-century America through his keen, attentive gaze...down to the nitty-gritty details even the newer kinds of social history can't quite reconstruct. That said, he's not a one-trick pony--one story deals with a wholesome relationship between the narrator's friend and the latter's fiance and comes complete with a scathing critique of rigid Confucian social mores, while another really nice story tells the tale of a beautiful but short-lived summer romance between the narrator and a strong-willed, intelligent young lady. And many of the stories address the complexities of racial relations, the ambiguity of modernity, the significance of the arts, and other such issues from interesting and thoughtful perspectives and in a manner that seldom seems strained. Whether your interest is in modern Japanese literature or modern American cultural history, you will find this book quite worth your while. And if you just want to read some good stories by a fine writer at the start of his promising career, well, you won't go wrong with this one either.