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Introduction
- University of Hawai'i Press
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INTRODUCTION 1 The delight of the urban poet is love—not at first sight, but at last sight. —WALTER BENJAMIN N agai Kafû was a flâneur, that urban “prowler” immortalized by the “first modernist,” Baudelaire, in Le Spleen de Paris.1 Kafû’s fiction, diaries, criticism, and occasional pieces document his perambulations in the modern(izing) metropolis that Tokyo had become by the beginning of the twentieth century, as he turns the “mobilized gaze of the flâneur” on the spectacle of contemporary life.2 Over the course of his career, Kafû’s view of that life shifted from approbation to censure, but his commitment to the act of chronicling the cityscape remained a constant through nearly six decades of literary production. Kafû is, however, more than a simple roving eye, more than simply the best observer of his chosen metropolis, though he was that too, as Edward Seidensticker has so eloquently demonstrated.3 The city in Kafû’s fiction, in particular, becomes a stage for the presentation of a developing aesthetic vision, a vision that serves as a barometer in reverse of Japan’s cultural climate during the first half of the twentieth century. In reverse because Kafû was, perhaps above all, a contrarian. Throughout his career, he took the cultural pulse of his burgeoning, metamorphosing nation and then did and said precisely the opposite. After writing Yume no onna (Woman of the Dream, 1903), arguably the best work to come of the “Zola fever” that swept Japan after the turn of the century and gave rise to Japanese Naturalism, he aligned himself with Mori Ògai and the Anti-Naturalists, repudiating the origins of the dominant mode of twentieth-century Japanese fiction, the “I novel.” After traveling to the West and returning to write the immensely successful Amerika monogatari (American Tales, 1908) and the famously censored Furansu monogatari (French Tales, 1909), which established him as a leader in the movement to create a modern, Western literature and situated him squarely in the literary avant-garde, he published a series of attacks on Japanese modernization and Westernization and began his long cultivation of the persona of a latter-day gesaku writer; that is, at the height of the Taishò frenzy of the new he recreated himself as a throwback to the world of premodern Japan. Two decades later, however, after the rest of the nation had made a seemingly similar “return to Japan” (Nihon kaiki) with the revalorization of native culture in the days leading up to the Pacific War, Kafû was highly critical of Japanese policy and the culture that had produced it. This study is a reconsideration of Kafû’s major fiction and the vision that shaped it from his first important mature work, Amerika monogatari, through his definitive masterpiece, Bokutò kidan (A Strange Tale from East of the River, 1937). Kafû’s contrarian spirit and his role as flâneur assured that he observed and recorded something of the Japanese experience of the modern, the complex negotiation of and painful coming to terms with the various challenges presented by the projects of defining a nation-state and both national and personal selves. While Kafû’s diaries and critical works provide a great deal of evidence concerning his thoughts on these subjects, it is his fiction that contains the most basic statements of his beliefs and the boldest expressions of his vision— though not always in the most transparent form. Kafû’s diaries, for example, are often cited for their relatively clear dissent from the war effort,4 while his essays provide a vivid picture of a man who was dismayed by developments in contemporary Japanese culture. But only in his fiction does Kafû confront the issues that concern him most deeply: aesthetic realities that receive his most subtle yet most candid reflection. The label most frequently given to Kafû’s work is “elegaic.” The heart of his literary production (apart from his immensely significant diary, Danchòtei nichijò [Dyspepsia House Days], which he kept from 1917 to 1959) is from the beginning of the Taishò era through the Pacific War, a period characterized in his literary and personal life by a seemingly endless search for the remnants of Edo culture in the increasingly modernized, and twice razed, neighborhoods of eastern Tokyo. The origins of and impetus for this backward glance are variously traced to Kafû’s disgust with Meiji culture and Tokyo squalor on his return from the West, as expressed in Shinkichòsha nikki (Diary...