In 1903, the young man who was to become one of Japan's finest writers left for the United States. He did not particularly want to go -- he would have much preferred France -- but his father insisted.
Kafu, the pen name the young man was later to take, had proved to be a disappointment to his bureaucrat father. The trip was to give him enough prestige to return as a "kichosha" (a person who had been abroad) and settle down as a respectable businessman.
This he was determined not to do, and though he moved around the country (Tacoma, Seattle; Kalamazoo, Mich.; Washington, D.C.; New York) he wasted no time learning trading expertise or American knowhow. Instead, he profitably spent his years (five, including one in France) by observing what he saw and jotting it down.
On the West Coast, he saw (and experienced) prejudice. "The way Japanese people are ostracized in this place is almost unbelievable. . . . No decent house or apartment will rent to Japanese or Chinese." At the same time, he chronicled the awful way that these stigmatized people turned against each other -- as stigmatized minorities will.
He talked with many of the people there and recorded the degrees of their unhappiness. He also knew that "the United States is a country where you can see both the best and worst in society, so that it is possible for a person to go in either direction, following his inclination."
Kafu's own inclinations had been formed first by being upper-middle-class Japanese, and, second, by becoming early besotted with French literature. He was thus gifted with a kind of double vision.
He saw America through Japanese eyes. The St. Louis Exposition was a "nightless city," after the example of Tokyo's Asakusa. The train trip from Kalamazoo to Chicago was "like passing by the vicinities of Shimbashi and Shinagawa." Mount Rainier became the "Tacoma Fuji," and New York turned into something in a late Japanese print.
"From the tall Times building and the Astor Hotel up north to the opera house and the faraway Herald Square with department stores like Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue in the other direction, the rows of buildings loom like clouds . . . only from the windows, higher up and lower down, lights are shining like stars, or fireflies."
The 23-year-old's other lens was French literature. The American stories are studded with quotes from Paul Verlaine and, Kafu's favorite, Charles Baudelaire. New York's Chinatown, for example, is described in terms reminiscent of Victor Hugo and its pleasures are referred back to Baudelaire's "paradis artificiels" (sic).
The major French contribution, however, was the stance offered the young Japanese traveler. He could assume the role of "flaneur" -- one cultivated by Baudelaire himself -- the stroller on the pavement, the uninvolved observer, who sees the heights and depths but remains unmoved.
The stance served him well. How unlike Kafu was (Natsume) Soseki, miserable in London. Both may have been lonely, but Kafu had an excuse. The flaneur is always lonely, it is part of the definition. "Alone," he says, sitting in Central Park, "looking at each occupant of the passing cars, I comment endlessly on the person's choice of fashion and degree of tastefulness." His apartness became not only a protection, but also a way to communicate.
From this comes the authentic Kafu tone -- apart but empathetic. Though it occurs little enough in an early work such as this collection, there are pregnant passages. "As the piano and violin played on, the sight of sailors and laborers embracing these women . . . in a dim electric light that was yellow from the dust on the floor, the smoke from cigarettes, and the smell of alcohol, gave me an indescribable sensation of pathos, going beyond disgust or detestation."
This sense of pathos in ordinary things -- identified as Japanese, though this country certainly has no monopoly on it -- is, in the work of Kafu, particularly linked to the lives of prostitutes. Here the double lenses of old Japan and literary France fuse.
The best of these American stories, "Ladies of the Night," is a description of goings-on in a high-class New York whorehouse in the spring of 1907. Its great anthropological interest is surpassed by the artistry with which the scene is conveyed. Kafu sees and feels everything, but he is never mentioned. He is not there at all except as a compassionate observer, alive to the pathos of the lives around him. In "Midnight at a Bar," he is downtown, just off Chatham Square, watching the misbehavior of the lower classes. But it is not a matter of class. It is the matter of being human, a classless state. And it is the pathos of this condition that Kafu so clearly sees and which, after he had returned to Japan, he would so successfully communicate in such masterpieces as "Quiet Rain" (1921) and "A Strange Tale from East of the River" (1937).
That his theories about prostitutes was backed up by healthy practice is well-known. While he was sitting in a bar in Washington, the woman next to him struck up a conversation. Later, he confided to his diary (not included in "American Stories") that "at her invitation, I went to her house." Thus began a fairly long affair with Edyth (for such was her name), one that provided the template, as it were, for those lovely, lonely relationships (such as that with O-Yuki in "A Strange Tale") that so distinguish Kafu's work.
(Edyth, incidentally, goes strangely unmentioned in Mitsuko Iriye's otherwise informative introduction. The full story is wonderfully told in Edward Seidensticker's magisterial "Kafu the Scribbler" (1965) and further details are to be found in the Kafu sections of Donald Keene's "Modern Japanese Diaries" (1995).)
It is perhaps telling that once out of America and into longed-for France, Kafu did not like the latter. He made, indeed, something of a specialty of not liking where he was. He loathed Meiji Japan until it became Taisho Japan, then he longed for Meiji. Ditto for Showa. But this, too, is part of flaneurship. It is essentially antiquarian, since it looks for timeless values in the transient present.
And even in a work as uneven and at times as callow as the "Amerika Monogatari" (and in the "Furansu Monogatari" that followed) there are passages that clearly foreshadow the hard-boiled compassion of this vulnerable observer.
The work was an instant success in Japan when it was published in 1908 because it gave firsthand news of what had not hitherto been reported. We now read it because of the angle from which Kafu viewed America -- one that both preserved and illuminated what he saw happening, one that insisted upon the pathos of all existence.
We owe this translation to the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College, which financed the publication (with help from The Japan Foundation) and to Frank Gibney and J. Thomas Rimer, editors for the Library of Japan, the series to which it belongs.
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