American Stories

by Kafū Nagai

Book Overview

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,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231117906
• ISBN13: 9780231117906
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 8.2"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

great read

This book was written by a Japanese man who lived and studied in the United states just after 1900. He stayed in various places around the country such as the state of Washington, Kalamazoo, and New York, among others. His writing was some of the first in its time to shed light on actual American life to Japanese readers, who tended to idealize America as a perfect country (the Meiji period was an era of learning from other cultures in Japan). Kafu's writing shows the darkness of early modern American racism, prostitution, and poverty, and places it in beautifully eerie settings. It is sometimes made to offend and outrage readers. I found it to be extremely interesting to see America from an immigrant's point of view in a time when so many people were flooding into the States.

A Young Writer in a Young Country

I generally find Nagai Kafu's fiction pretty interesting despite my usual tastes in literature. His lifelong fascination with the seedier side of life would turn me off if he were a lesser writer, but somehow he invests all of this with a melancholy lyricism while all the same not whitewashing or trivializing his subject matter. And with this excellent series of semi-autobiographical short stories Nagai, a fledging writer no less, has already got the knack for this balancing act, only here he's not roaming Asakusa or the Tokyo brothels but rather the back allies of New York or the immigrant slums of Seattle. It is fascinating both to see Nagai treat his familiar themes in an unfamiliar setting and to see turn-of-the-(last)-century America through his keen, attentive gaze...down to the nitty-gritty details even the newer kinds of social history can't quite reconstruct. That said, he's not a one-trick pony--one story deals with a wholesome relationship between the narrator's friend and the latter's fiance and comes complete with a scathing critique of rigid Confucian social mores, while another really nice story tells the tale of a beautiful but short-lived summer romance between the narrator and a strong-willed, intelligent young lady. And many of the stories address the complexities of racial relations, the ambiguity of modernity, the significance of the arts, and other such issues from interesting and thoughtful perspectives and in a manner that seldom seems strained. Whether your interest is in modern Japanese literature or modern American cultural history, you will find this book quite worth your while. And if you just want to read some good stories by a fine writer at the start of his promising career, well, you won't go wrong with this one either.