Table Of ContentFICTIONS
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
