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CHAPTER 2 MAUPASSANT AND AMERIKA MONOGATARI 34 Traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. —WALTER BENJAMIN T hough Kafû was of the opinion that his career as a writer began the moment he presented himself on the doorstep of the Ken’yûsha writer Hirotsu Ryûrò (1861–1929), Nakamura Mitsuo takes a more conservative view, labeling as “practice pieces” (shûsaku) all the works from Kafû’s early period, including the Ryûrò-influenced Shin Umegoyomi (The New Plum Calendar, 1901), the “Zolaesque” novels Yashin (Ambition, 1902), Jigoku no hana (The Flowers of Hell, 1902), and even the superior Yume no onna (Woman of the Dream, 1903).1 In Nakamura’s reading, Amerika monogatari (1908) is the first work in which Kafû finds a mature, individual voice, and this voice, the product of Kafû’s development into a man and a writer, is the result of his five years abroad in the United States and France.2 While it is not clear that Kafû would have been unable to develop into a mature writer at home, for a number of reasons it does seem that Amerika monogatari is the logical starting point for a consideration of Kafû’s career as a writer of innovative fiction. It represents the point at which one begins to see in Kafû’s fiction the development of a concern for the kinds of narrative issues that seem to have occupied Mori Ògai and, coincidentally, the point at which one begins to see marked influence on Kafû’s work from the only writer besides Ògai whom Kafû considered a worthy teacher: Guy de Maupassant. It is also in this collection that Kafû begins to define themes that would characterize his fiction throughout his career and to develop linkages between them and the formal elements that persist in later, more complex works. MAUPASSANT AND THE FRAMED NARRATIVE Kafû’s debt to Maupassant for the moods, themes, characterizations, and even plots of several of the stories in Amerika monogatari has been studied in some detail. Akase Masako pairs a number of stories from Amerika monogatari with Maupassant stories she sees as indispensable to interpreting Kafû’s efforts.3 For example, “Makiba no michi” (Path through the Pasture), the story of a Japanese laborer who has gone insane after his wife is raped by his fellow workers in a logging camp near Tacoma, is read in light of Maupassant’s “Fou?” which is the brief firstperson narrative of a man who has murdered his wife’s horse out of jealousy over what he perceives as the virtually sexual relationship between the two. Akase points to a general congruence of topic (“madness” in the broadest sense).4 Similarly, Kafû’s “Suibijin” (Drunken Beauty), the story of a painter ruined by his obsession with a dark-skinned, vampirelike woman, is linked to Maupassant’s “Les Soeurs Rondoli,” about a Frenchman who becomes infatuated with a dark Italian woman from Genoa, or to “Allouma,” Maupassant’s account of a Frenchman in the desert of Algeria who becomes obsessed with an Arab woman.5 “Chòhatsu” (Longhair ) is compared with Maupassant’s “La Moustache,” both stories mentioning a woman concerned with a lover’s hair (though this conceit forms the core of Maupassant’s ironic story, while constituting only a minor element in Kafû’s). Another, more enlightening, parallel is drawn between Kafû’s somewhat notorious sketch of a New York brothel, “Yoru no onna” (Women of the Night) (which Edward Seidensticker terms “beautifully informed”), and Maupassant’s of a provincial one, “Maison Tellier.”6 It is, in fact, possible to substantiate these thematic links by tracing Kafû’s reading habits while in America. His diary carefully records the pace at which he devours the works of Maupassant, and the timing of his reading of certain stories relates closely to the production of similar ones of his own (a fact that may explain the persistence with which critics draw connections between seemingly only incidentally related stories such as “Makiba no michi” and “Fou?”). The considerable documentation, both Kafû’s own and that of his critics, of the intertextual relationships between Amerika monogatari and the contes of Maupassant, however, rarely goes beyond the drawing of lines between stories in a list of Kafû’s works and another of Maupassant ’s; little attempt has been made to suggest what it was that Kafû might have been learning, what sorts of things...

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