by Nagai Kafu
Intending to go home, I walked on the cement-paved sidewalk of this large street with a bleak view. The shops lining the street had already locked their doors, but the electric lights inside were shining like daylight upon various kinds of merchandise displayed in the glass windows. In front of them, I noticed a number of passersby halting and lingering. A woman who appeared to be a poor housewife was lost in admiration in front of a jewelry store even as she shivered in the cold air, while a man wearing a tattered jacket without an overcoat was staring with sunken eyes at the breads beautifully displayed at a bakery. It was easy to know what was on their minds. But they did not seem to be embarrassed about it at all.
As I approached a corner, I heard some noisy music. Then the voices of many people became audible. It was a store selling liquor, and the colored glass door at the entrance was kept open, but as something like a screen was placed inside, I was prevented from looking into the far end. However, from an opening where the warm air polluted with the smell of liquor and tobacco smoke was oozing out, I was able to discern several kinds of nude paintings hung high up on the walls, brightly lit by electric lights. Laborers, wandering around town in large crowds at night with huge pipes in their mouths and their hands thrust into the pockets of their trousers, were pushing one another in quick succession at this entrance. The inside was apparently quite spacious, for the sound of shoes, chairs, wine glasses, every noise in the room reverberated against the high ceiling, while the monotonous music sounded at times like a storm charging into a cave.
For a while I stood still, feeling intrigued, but then fear welled up in my heart as I watched the appearances and faces of those coming in and going out. Not only were they all glaring suspiciously and shaking their drooping heads from time to time, but when they walked away they dragged their feet in thick-soled shoes as if their bull-like bodies were too heavy, and their retreating figures became obscure at once, like so many shadows, and vanished in the thin fog. Aren’t their demeanors those of wounded wild animals who have lost even their willpower to run? I could not help being reminded of the terrible lives of laborers so often depicted by Western writers . . . especially in Zola’s L’assomoir.
Just at that moment, a man stopped in front of me. Without a doubt, he had just come out of the saloon’s door. Thinking that a drunken laborer of this country wanted to tease me, I was about to go away, startled.
Since it is the Japanese and Chinese who sell their labor for the cheapest wages and steadily encroach upon their territory, Japs must be among the laborers’ most hated enemies. I knew that people in this area universally detested Japanese and so I tried to get away in great fear.
“You! Wait,” the person called out from behind in accented Japanese, to my great surprise.
Astounded, I turned around.
“Aren’t you my countryman? I’ve got to hold your hand for a little while.”
So saying, he approached me falteringly.
“What is it?” I asked quietly.
He did not answer but stared at me with his sharp eyes. He must be over thirty years of age. While he is not particularly short, his legs are bowed in typically Japanese fashion, and the skin of his face with its protruding cheekbones is coarse and of a reddish-brown color; even to his fellow countryman, he simply cannot be considered nice-looking. He is wearing an old fedora stained with rain and dust, and underneath his torn, completely wrinkled suit he is not wearing a white shirt but a grubby flannel undershirt with a crooked tie. He must be either a laborer hired for railway construction work or else a servant employed as a kitchen hand by some white family, but certainly not of higher status.
“What do you want to ask me?”
When I questioned him once more, he looked at my face with even sharper eyes but then opened his thick lips and started shouting violently.
“What makes you think I would have stopped you if I didn’t have something to ask? Aren’t you from the same country as I? Aren’t you a compatriot? Then don’t! Don’t talk so coldly to your countryman. Don’t.”
“What’s the matter? You misunderstood me. You must be terribly upset about something,” I tried to speak with a calm voice, though I was astonished.
“Of course. I am hopping mad. I want to tear my heart apart, I am that mad at myself. I just gulped down several glasses of whisky to try to forget what’s been bothering me for so long. I wanted to stop you to tell you something because you are my compatriot.”
He grabbed my coat sleeve. I could not help but be extremely disconcerted, but there was no longer any way of escaping. Helplessly, I leaned against the wall of a store and lingered on.
“You know. I’m an uneducated migrant worker. I don’t know the language of America. No, I don’t even know many Japanese characters. But I have strong arms. I used these arms to make as much money as possible. Actually, I have already earned a few dollars. But, but . . .” He opened his eyes frightfully wide and once again grabbed my sleeve.
“What happened? But don’t talk so loud. The passersby will become suspicious of us.”
“Let them, if they want. I don’t know their language, and they don’t know mine. So who cares?”
He was about to howl once again, but behind him there were already two or three people lingering with the disdainful look that they show whenever they see Japanese; feeling totally embarrassed, I fell silent, red-faced.
“Who cares? Are you afraid of the Yankees? Have you forgotten the Japanese spirit that’s within us?”
He stuck out his yellow teeth and looked around, smiling in a revolting way, but soon his bloodshot eyes fell sharply upon some- body; among the people standing behind him was a young woman leaning on a man’s arm. Perhaps fearful of the night air, she was wearing her hood over her eyes, from which her disheveled blond hair was falling upon her pink cheeks; as he saw this seductive woman place her head against the man’s chest and whisper something, looking at his face as if utterly disgusted, he screamed, “You whore!” as if he could no longer contain the anger that welled up in him, and spat in her direction.
His spit stuck on the woman’s shoes, the woman screamed, and her companion came forward, clenching his fists.
I do not know to what sort of class such a woman belongs, being in the street so late at night. But the people witnessing this scene were all in an uproar to avenge her humiliation. Violent words were uttered, and I was completely at a loss, not knowing where to escape.
All of a sudden, a huge arm like that of a Niô [Buddhist guardian god] appeared. Stretching over the heads of the crowd, it caught the shoulder of this rude Japanese laborer like an eagle grasping its prey. Startled, I looked up; it was a towering giant of a policeman of this country.
Without uttering an unnecessary word and with the slow pace of an elephant, he easily dragged away the undersized Japanese laborer who struggled with all his might. People gradually drifted away, laughing among themselves as if this scene were funnier than a farce in town.
The night fog enveloping the city had grown even denser, and now it was virtually impossible to see a few inches ahead. The numerous jeerers, their victim who was my countryman, and the frightening policeman all were lost in the absence of light. I realized only after some time had passed that I was still leaning against the store’s cold wall in a daze, yet I didn’t know how to escape from this totally dreadful trance. I have no idea which dark street I managed to take to return home.
Several days later, I heard the following story from a Japanese of long residence in this area.
A certain immigrant who had worked on railroads for close to ten years and accumulated five hundred dollars deposited the money at a savings agency organized by a group of Japanese. However, some time ago, due to a certain event this savings agency went bankrupt. Distressed at having lost the fruit of ten years’ hard work, the immigrant almost killed himself, but then half of his savings, two hundred and fifty dollars, came back to him as a result of the post-bankruptcy investigation and settlement. Ala
s, the great joy that suddenly overwhelmed him after despair had almost driven him to death made this simple-minded laborer go berserk. He probably ended up climbing the stairs to a gambling den. The very next day after he had received the leftover savings, he became a penniless beggar and began wandering about the streets.
He has now been thrown within the iron fence of an insane asylum on the outskirts of the city. You may not know this, but in this country, once you are committed to an insane asylum, in nine out of ten cases, chances are that you will never come out alive. So he too will suffer from improper treatment and soon die, after shouting all day long at the cold walls that he is going to tear his heart apart.
You ask where this asylum is? It is not very far away if you take the train. On a Sunday, perhaps, you can go and see. They say that besides him two or three other Japanese laborers are incarcerated there; despair has driven them to insanity. . . .
I merely nodded in silence, because I felt suddenly so moved.
(Written at a hotel in North America, November 1903 [published in Bungeikai, July 1, 1904])
Notes
1. Kafū’s postcard to a literary friend, Ikuta Kizan, dated February 27, 1904, in Kafū zenshū [Collected works of Kafū, hereafter cited as KZ], 30 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992–1995), vol. 27, p. 7.
2. John Fox, Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (New York: Scribner’s, 1912), p. 332.
3. The first edition of Amerika monogatari included three pieces about France, but these were deleted from later editions and instead added to the collection Furansu monogatari [French stories].
4. Edward Seidensticker, Kafū the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafū, z8.79–z959 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 13.
5. Kafū’s letter to Nishimura Keijirō, postmarked February 20, 1908, KZ, vol. 27, p. 23.
6. Kafū’s letter to Mokuyōkai (Thursday Club), 1907, in KZ, vol. 27, p. 19.
7. Seidensticker, p. 25.
8. Kafū’s postcard to Nishimura, postmarked December 27, 1904, KZ, vol. 27, p. 25.
9. Kalamazoo College, “The College Index,” vol. 27, no. 2 (November 1905), p. 50.
10. KZ, vol. 4, p. 305.
11. The name of Julius L. Stewart, Paris, appears in Official Catalogue of Exhibits, Department of Art, revised edition (St. Louis, 1904), p. 37. One of his oil paintings was entitled Grand Matin (nude figure).
12. KZ, vol. 5, p. 357.
13. Mitsuko Iriye, “‘Amerika monogatari’ no yohaku ni miru Kafū [Kafū as seen in the margins of American Stories], Bungaku [Literature], July 1992, p. 12.
14. KZ, vol. 6, p. 266.
15. Ibid., vol. 7, p. 189.
16. Ibid., vol. 7, p. 74.
17. Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Diaries: The Japanese at Home and Abroad as Revealed Through Their Diaries (New York: Columbia Universi¬ty Press, 1998), p. 492. I offer a detailed analysis of Kafū’s early writings in “Quest for Literary Resonance: Young Kafū and French Literature” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1969). See also my “‘Amerika monogatari’” cited above.
18. Literal rendition into English of Kafū’s translation from the original. Kafū makes a mistake in thinking that the word seuls (only) modifies the verb partent (leave), instead of ceux-ld (those).
19. Trow General Directory of New York City (New York, 1915) lists Shanley restaurants at 117 West 42nd Street, 1204 Broadway, and 1493 Broadway. See p. 2578.
20. In later editions, “Negro slave-servant” is changed to “Negro servant.”
21. In later editions, the word “automatic chair” was changed to “easy chair.”
22. The part of the sentence from “so I may” to “Atlantic Ocean” was omitted in later editions. In reality, the author was a very tall person for a Japanese.
23. This paragraph was omitted in later editions.
24. Literal translation of Kafū’s own translation.
25. Literal translation of Kafū’s own translation. The original poem, “Enivrez-vous” [Get drunk], can be found in Baudelaire’s collection of prose poems, Le spleen de Paris [The spleen of Paris, 1869].
26. In later editions, the word “foreigners” was changed to “Westerners.”
27. Literal translation of Kafū’s translation.
28. Literal translation of Kafū’s translation.
29. Literal translation of Kafū’s translation.
30. Literal translation of Kafū’s translation.
31. Literal translation of Kafū’s translation.
32. Literal translation of Kafū’s translation.