In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

NOTES 155 INTRODUCTION 1. Marshall Berman designates Baudelaire as the “first modernist” in All That’s Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 133. “Prowler” is Edward K. Kaplan’s translation of flâneur in Charles Baudelaire, The Parisian Prowler (trans. of Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose), trans. Edward Kaplan (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989). 2. The phrase is Anne Friedberg’s in Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 29. 3. Seidensticker’s Kafû the Scribbler (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965) is a brilliant account of Kafû’s love affair with Tokyo. Regular and continuing resurgences in Kafû’s popularity in Japan have produced an enormous biographical literature, much of which focuses on the relationship between the writer and his settings. Interesting in part for their exhaustiveness, among the more recent offerings are Matsumoto Hajime’s Nagai Kafû no Tòkyò kûkan (Tokyo: Kawade shobò shinsha, 1992) and Nagai Kafû, hitorigurashi (Tokyo: Sanseidò, 1994). 4. See, for example, David C. Earhart’s “Nagai Kafû’s Wartime Diary: The Enormity of Nothing,” Japan Quarterly, October–December 1994, pp. 488–504. 5. A disgust that Ishikawa Takuboku famously compared to that of “the son of a wealthy man of the provinces who, having spent a long while and a good deal of his father’s money in Tokyo, returns home all too eager to tell anyone who will listen about the rusticity and lack of refinement in the local geisha.” Quoted in Suzuki Fumitaka, Wakaki Nagai Kafû no bungaku to shisò (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 1995), p. 191 6. Kòtoku Shûsui (1871–1911) was among twelve radicals executed in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate the Meiji emperor. In “Hanabi,” Kafû laments the lack of protest over the incident, citing Zola’s response to the Dreyfus Affair. Seidensticker argues persuasively, however, that the importance of the Kòtoku case in Kafû’s career has been exaggerated by others and by Kafû himself (Kafû the Scribbler, pp. 46–47). 7. From “Hanabi,” quoted in Seidensticker, Kafû the Scribbler, p. 46. 8. This obsession was expressed finally in Kafû’s famous (but unhonored) wish to be buried with prostitutes of the Yoshiwara. 9. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 157 10. Walter Benjamin, “The Metaphysics of Youth,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 8. 11. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 12–13. CHAPTER 1. ÒGAI, KAFÛ, AND THE LIMITS OF FICTION 1. J. Thomas Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions (Princeton , N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 140. A more likely choice might have been, for example, Ueda Bin, who shared Kafû’s interest in French literature. 2. Ibid., p. 139. 3. Robert Lyons Danly, In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyò, a Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 109. 4. Ching-mao Cheng is among the many scholars who suggest that a common interest in the past played a role in the friendship. He points out that Kafû kept Ògai’s Shibue Chûsai at his bedside throughout his life but concludes that Kafû would simply have been happy that Ògai, “whom he had always held in esteem as his teacher and as a literary giant of modern Japan, was, like himself, also interested in the Edo period.” Ching-mao Cheng, “Nagai Kafû and Chinese Tradition” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1971), p. 120. 5. Nagai Kafû, Kafû zenshû (hereafter KZ), vol. 15 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1963), p. 265. Kafû had earlier given a somewhat more detailed description of the first meeting in “Kakademo no ki” (1918), where he recalled that Ògai favored him with a smile and told him that he had read Jigoku no hana, a compliment that caused Kafû to walk from Shitaya home to Kòjimachi in an elated trance (KZ, vol. 14, p. 363). 6. For a discussion of the events surrounding this production, see Richard Bowring, Mori Ògai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 158–159. Ògai’s account of the evening makes no mention of meeting the young Nagai Sòkichi. 7. Etò suggests that Ògai and Kaf...

Share