Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafū PDF
Preview Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafū
FICTIONS OF DESIRE FICTIONS OF DESIRE NARRATIVE FORM IN THE NOVELS OF NAGAI KAFÛ STEPHEN SNYDER University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu This book has been published with the aid of a subvention from the Eugene M. Kayden fund for the 1998 University of Colorado Faculty Manuscript Award. © 2000 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 05 04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Snyder, Stephen, 1957– Fictions of desire : narrative form in the novels of Nagai Kafu / Stephen Snyder. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–8248–2147–5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0–8248–2236–6 (paper : alk. paper) 1. Nagai, Kafû, 1879–1959—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Japanese fiction—1868—History and criticism. I. Title. PL812.A4 Z8837 2000 99–057346 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Clarence Lee Clarence Lee Design & Associates Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 8 Ògai, Kafû,and the Limits of Fiction CHAPTER 2 34 Maupassant and Amerika monogatari CHAPTER 3 54 Udekurabe: The Demimonde East and West CHAPTER 4 92 Frustrated Form: Narrative Subversion inOkamezasa CHAPTER 5 115 Bokutò kidan: A “Strange Tale” and the Self-Conscious Modern NOTES 155 BIBLIOGRAPHY 181 INDEX 189 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS T his book began as a dissertation at Yale University and has evolved over several years with the help of a number of people and institutions. The initial research was done at the University of Tokyo with the support of a dissertation research grant from the Japan Foundation. Professor Hirakawa Sukehiro of the Department of Com- parative Literature and Culture provided invaluable advice and support during this period and later served as one of the readers for the disserta- tion. While in Japan, I also benefited from the help of Nakamura Fumiko and Moriyasu Machiko, who guided me through the intricacies of Kafû’s prose and pointed me in the direction of an eel restaurant in Asakusa that Kafû once frequented. I am deeply grateful to them and to many other friends in Japan who helped make Kafû’s work come alive. A Yale Sumitomo Fellowship funded my dissertation writing. At the University of Colorado I have been fortunate to have friends and colleagues who have supported me during the revision process. I am particularly grateful to Laurel Rodd, Stephen Miller, Howard Gold- blatt, Marcia Yonemoto, Cris Reyns, and Janie Smith, as well as former colleagues Anne Allison and Xiaobing Tang. Their friendship has made the act of giving birth to this book both possible and at times actually pleasant. I am also fortunate to have had many wonderful students who have suffered through versions of these readings and have been instru- mental in their refinement. Sandy Adler, also at the University of Colo- rado, was very helpful in the preparation of the manuscript. I would like to thank Sharon Yamamoto, at the University of Hawai‘i Press, for her patience and encouragement throughout my work on this project. Few editors would have been willing to run a 10K race at five thousand feet in the course of developing a manuscript. I am also grate- ful to Masako Ikeda and Susan Stone at the press as well as to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for many useful suggestions that have greatly improved this book. I would like to thank my parents, Barbara and Donald Snyder, to whom this book is dedicated, for their love and absolutely unstinting support of every endeavor I have ever made. This book would have been impossible without them. It would also have been impossible without the vii day-to-day encouragement of my family. John and Emma provided joy and distraction, and Linda White has been my partner in this undertak- ing from the beginning, reading, commenting, and always encouraging. To her I am most grateful. Finally and most importantly, I would like to thank Edwin McClellan, Sumitomo Professor of Japanese at Yale University, who introduced me to Kafû and inspired and guided this study. I am deeply grateful for his constant and continued advice and encouragement and for the model he provides as scholar and teacher. viii Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION The delight of the urban poet is love—not at first sight, but at last sight. —WALTERBENJAMIN Nagai Kafû was a flâneur, that urban “prowler” immortalized by the “first modernist,” Baudelaire, in Le Spleen de Paris.1 Kafû’s fiction, diaries, criticism, and occasional pieces document his perambulations in the modern(izing) metropolis that Tokyo had become by the beginning of the twentieth century, as he turns the “mobilized gaze of the flâneur” on the spectacle of contemporary life.2 Over the course of his career, Kafû’s view of that life shifted from approbation to censure, but his commitment to the act of chronicling the cityscape remained a constant through nearly six decades of literary production. Kafû is, however, more than a simple roving eye, more than simply the best observer of his chosen metropolis, though he was that too, as Edward Seidensticker has so eloquently demonstrated.3The city in Kafû’s fiction, in particular, becomes a stage for the presentation of a develop- ing aesthetic vision, a vision that serves as a barometer in reverse of Japan’s cultural climate during the first half of the twentieth century. In reverse because Kafû was, perhaps above all, a contrarian. Throughout his career, he took the cultural pulse of his burgeoning, meta- morphosing nation and then did and said precisely the opposite. After writing Yume no onna (Woman of the Dream, 1903), arguably the best work to come of the “Zola fever” that swept Japan after the turn of the century and gave rise to Japanese Naturalism, he aligned himself with Mori Ògai and the Anti-Naturalists, repudiating the origins of the domi- nant mode of twentieth-century Japanese fiction, the “I novel.” After traveling to the West and returning to write the immensely successful Amerika monogatari (American Tales, 1908) and the famously censored Furansu monogatari (French Tales, 1909), which established him as a leader in the movement to create a modern, Western literature and situ- ated him squarely in the literary avant-garde, he published a series of attacks on Japanese modernization and Westernization and began his long cultivation of the persona of a latter-day gesakuwriter; that is, at the height of the Taishò frenzy of the new he recreated himself as a throw- back to the world of premodern Japan. Two decades later, however, after 1
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