Kafū Nagai

Kafū Nagai (1879-1959) was a Japanese novelist, editor and translator whose fiction portrays the demimonde of Tokyo in the early twentieth century. He matters because his sensual, carefully observed pictures of the city and its pleasure quarters helped introduce Japanese urban life to readers abroad.

He was born in Tokyo into a family of officials and cultured people. His father, who had studied in the United States, rose to a senior government post in the years after the Meiji Restoration. As a young man Kafū began visiting the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, a setting he would later render in detail. He enrolled in a foreign language school in 1898 but did not pursue his studies steadily, and by then he was already writing. His early work drew on French naturalism, though it soon took on a more aesthetic and distinctly Japanese tone.

Between 1903 and 1908 he lived in the United States and then in France, and these years supplied material for stories set in the West. Over time he moved away from naturalism towards aestheticism. His masterpiece, by common critical consent, is A Strange Tale from East of the River (1937). Patrick Modiano praised him as the great chronicler of Tokyo, comparing him on that score with Dostoevsky and Balzac.

During the militarist period he refused to publish and declined to support the Axis government, and his writing was effectively silenced until the war ended. He translated, wrote essays and plays. In his final years he returned to fiction, though without the intensity of his best books. His diary, kept until his death in 1959, was published after the war and remains central to his legacy.