Positioning the Observer: Interrogations of Alterity in Nagai Kafū's Amerika Monogatari

One of a growing number of Meiji writers and intellectuals who traveled to the West in search of new knowledge and experience, Nagai Kafū (1879-1959) sailed for America on the Shinanomaru on 22 September 1903. He was to stay in that country for four years. Thanks to his travels in America and later France, Kafū was to spend more time abroad than any other Japanese writer of his generation, and he wrote over thirty short stories and essays on various aspects of life in the West. The two collections of these pieces, Amerika monogatari (Tales of America, 1908) and Furansu monogatari (Tales of France, 1909), were popular among Meiji readers.¹ The collections portrayed the brightness of city life and the stimulating arts of the capitals, as well as the broad expanses seen from train windows in America and France. Kafū also created a persona for himself that intrigued Japanese audiences, a young cosmopolitan gentleman abroad who mixed freely with intellectuals and prostitutes alike in New York and Paris.

On the surface, Amerika monogatari presents a simple binary pattern, where America is constructed as the ideal country of wide open spaces and bustling modern cities, a "new continent" in contrast to the island nation of Japan with its confusion of old streets and hemmed-in countryside. America's status as the "sacred land of liberty" is set off against the restrictive Confucian mores of Japan, while Japan's racial homogeneity is contrasted with America's mixed society.² But throughout the collection, Kafū's vision of America swings between the ideal of the "country of freedom" symbolized by the Statue of Liberty and the reality of a nation deeply divided by racial tension and discrimination, felt by Kafū himself as a Japanese.

When speaking of Meiji literature, it is tempting to focus on the tendency, found in much of the discourse of the period, to set Japan up against the West in a dialectical relationship of mutually defining opposites.³ Such binary opposition does inform the structure of Kafū's works and indeed would form the basis of his later critique of Meiji Japan. To focus solely on this dimension of Amerika monogatari, however, is to fail to credit the critical faculties of Kafū and other writers like him, who often comprehended (and represented) the world in a more flexible way. This article aims to show how Kafū uses the Other as contrast in Amerika monogatari but avoids limiting himself to a strict binary construct; instead he takes up an array of flexible positions. "America" and "Japan" emerge not as simple opposites, but as poles on an axis of varying degrees of "Americanness" and "Japaneseness." By demonstrating that the act of contrast is never straightforward, Kafū interrogates the idea of literary construct through contrast, problematizing not only the image of America as Other but the ways in which writers formulate such images.

The first set of stories of Amerika monogatari, written in 1903-1904, explore the Japanese immigration experience and thus revolve around the Japanese communities in the western coastal towns of Seattle and Tacoma, portraying the adjustments needed to live in a foreign country and the hostility encountered from Americans who feel threatened by the flood of cheap labor from Japan and China. In these stories "the West" is originally a dream or ideal of the perfect country, but anticipations of experiencing this ideal soon give way to the harsh reality of disillusionment and despair.⁴ Kafū's own encounter with America is colored by the mixed experiences of many Japanese immigrants at the turn of the century, and the first few stories of Amerika monogatari depict Kafū's empathy for those immigrants as well as an ambivalence about his relationship with them. As a gentleman and a scholar, Kafū was ever conscious of his own social standing in the new world. In the immigrant stories of Amerika monogatari, he interrogates and problematizes the idea of Otherness in America through his depiction of his own position as an external observer-narrator who confronts a double alterity of...