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CHAPTER 3 UDEKURABE: THE DEMIMONDE EAST AND WEST 54 Once it dawns on you that the quarters of the night are built on nothing but a pack of lies, you young men will understand how to manage your affairs. —IHARA SAIKAKU The prostitute is preeminently someone with a novelistic destiny: a special, idiosyncratic form of life. —ALFRED BÉGUIN The moment, in the spring of 1916, when Kafû retired from his position as instructor at Keiò Gijuku (later Keiò University) and as editor of Mita bungaku is significant not only in the sense that it signaled what Edward Seidensticker calls Kafû’s “withdrawal” from the literary clique, or bundan (or the start of what Isoda Kòichi characterizes as Kafû’s life of “radical individualism”), but also because it directly preceded the publication of the two important and, by Kafû’s standards, substantial novels Seidensticker labels “stragglers.”1 The two are Udekurabe (Geisha in Rivalry, 1917) and Okamezasa (Dwarf Bamboo, 1918), and their publication marked the end of a productive period that lasted from Kafû’s return from abroad in 1908 through a premature (and ultimately abortive) retirement . The 1920s were, by all measures, a fallow period for Kafû; yet despite the impending silence, there is a sense in which the “stragglers” are also the culmination of Kafû’s thematic and formal investigations that started in the stories of Amerika monogatari and led Kafû into a period of incubation that eventually gave birth to the fullest expression of his literary practice in works such as Tsuyu no atosaki (During the Rains, 1931), Hikage no hana (Flowers in the Shade, 1934), and Bokutò kidan (A Strange Tale from East of the River, 1937). Udekurabe and Okamezasa are read together for the complementary picture they paint of two aspects of the Tokyo demimonde: the traditional , elegant shitamachi licensed quarter of Shimbashi and the more tawdry unlicensed pleasure districts mixed in among the bourgeois neighborhoods of the Yamanote. Despite the contrast in setting, the novels share themes (prostitution, sexual desire, the relationship between art and life) and narrative methods that, taken as a whole, serve as a summation of all that Kafû had learned to this point. These novels are situated on a cusp in Kafû’s career, the moment at which he is committing himself, once and for all, to what is generally referred to as his “bunjin (reclusive literatus) pose,” a persona he would maintain in one form or another throughout the remainder of his career. His savage criticism of mindless imitation of the West and the ugly, hybrid culture it had produced in Japan, which marked such works as Reishò (Sneers, 1909) and Shinkichòsha nikki (Diary of a Recent Returnee, 1909), had long since faded to a more melancholy attempt to salvage what remained of a rapidly fading past. The stories from Shinkyò yawa (Night Tales from Shimbashi, 1912) to Ame shòshò (Quiet Rain, 1918), like the numerous essays on aspects of Edo culture he published in the same period, are marked by the quirky tone, at once cantankerous and elegiac, that has come to be Kafû’s trademark. During these years surrounding his resignation from his official positions, Kafû’s relationships within the bundan became increasingly strained, resulting finally, around the time of Udekurabe, in what amounted to total estrangement from nearly all his literary acquaintances . Thereafter, Kafû came increasingly to embody the image he and the press had constructed: a lonely, peculiar recluse whose idiosyncratic peregrinations in the Tokyo demimonde could provide endless, if ephemeral , grist for literary biographers. The portrait of Kafû that emerges in all of these accounts is of a man whose misanthropy and reclusiveness increase with the passing years; but at the same time it becomes clear that Kafû’s rejection is selective, that his dislike of reporters and fellow writers is matched by his pleasure in the company of the women who inhabited the “quarters of the night,” as Saikaku calls them. It requires then only a slight adjustment of perspective to see Kafû’s rejection of one segment of society (the “polite,” literary one) as simply an increased commitment to another he found infinitely more interesting. In any event, it is clear that along with the often-noted elegiac tone, one of the most significant features of Kafû’s work from the time of the “withdrawal” is the fact that it is overwhelmingly set in the demimonde.2 Satò Haruo believes that this interest reflected Kafû’s discovery that the...

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