Nagai Kafu is one of the greatest modern Japanese writers, but
until now his classic collection, American Stories, based on his
sojourn from Japan to Washington State, Michigan, and New York City
in the early years of the twentieth century, has never been
available in English. Here, with a detailed and insightful
introduction, is an elegant translation of Kafu's perceptive and
lyrical account. Like de Tocqueville a century before, Kafu casts a
fresh, keen eye on vibrant and varied America-world fairs, concert
halls, and college campuses; saloons, the immigrant underclass, and
red-light districts. Many of his vignettes involve encounters with
fellow Japanese or Chinese immigrants, some of whom are poorly paid
laborers facing daily discrimination. The stories paint a broad
landscape of the challenges of American life for the poor, the
foreign born, and the disaffected, peopled with crisp individual
portraits that reveal the daily disappointments and occasional
euphorias of modern life. Translator Mitsuko Iriye's introduction
provides important cultural and biographical background about
Kafu's upbringing in rapidly modernizing Japan, as well as literary
context for this collection. In the first story, "Night Talk in a
Cabin," three young men sailing from Japan to Seattle each reveal
how poor prospects, shattered confidence, or a broken heart has
driven him to seek a better life abroad. In "Atop the Hill," the
narrator meets a fellow Japanese expatriate at a small midwestern
religious college, who slowly reveals his complex reasons for
leaving behind his wife in Japan. Caught between the pleasures of
America's cities and the stoicism of its small towns, he wonders if
he can ever return home. Kafu plays with the contradictions and
complexities of early twentieth-century America, revealing the
tawdry, poor, and mundane underside of New York's glamour in
"Ladies of the Night" while celebrating the ingenuity,
cosmopolitanism, and freedom of the American city in "Two Days in
Chicago." At once sensitive and witty, elegant and gritty, these
stories provide a nuanced outsider's view of the United States and
a perfect entrance into modern Japanese literature.
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