Kafu never uses the word “condemned” when referring to a house, building or district, but it hangs over most of his work. There is, in fact, barely an area of Tokyo left today that corresponds to his descriptions. A rapid process of decay, renewal and replacement must have been as much a part of Kafu’s urban Tokyo as it is now. In Coming Down with a Cold, a short story published in 1912, the author describes the premises of the pleurisy-afflicted geisha Masukichi and her companion, a building that could hardly have been more than two or three decades old at the time, as “a third-rate brick tenement, a sort of relic, very shabby, of early Meiji”. The opportunity to elegize a way of life, a condemned quarter of the old city or some fading custom or practice offered him a certain potential. Had the old city and all that went with it remained intact, it is doubtful that Kafu would have found quite the same muse that helped to make his name. “Buildings had to be decaying,” Edward Seidensticker wrote, “cultures ill and dying, if not dead, before he could really like them.”
Kafu knew the city at first hand having bought, rented or variously occupied premises in various locations from which he subsequently drew inspiration, such as Koishikawa, where he was born and raised, Yanagibashi and Asakusa. Some of these addresses found their way into the titles of his works, like Azabu Miscellany and Commuting to Tsukiji. Others, like Okubo, mused on at length in Tidings from Okubo, he was to temporarily abandon only to move back at a later stage. Many of Kafu’s most delightful, random descriptions of out-of-the-way corners of Tokyo (“I feel quite satisfied if I can wander the streets aimlessly and scribble down whatever comes into my head,” he wrote in his diary at the time) appear in his serendipitous 1915 collection of city vignettes entitled Fair-Weather Geta. Kafu was always keen to match human dramas with a physical location, a common enough technique among novelists, but in his case this characteristic is developed to an exceptional degree. It is this trait that has left us with highly vivid and detailed evocations of certain districts of Tokyo.
Kafu can always be relied on to sing the praises of places that give off a special aura, however sordid the milieu. He felt an affinity for the peculiar smells, sounds, and people that composed the texture and depraved Orientalism of New York’s Chinatown during his year-long sojourn there. “I love Chinatown,” he wrote in imitation of Baudelaire and other poets, mostly French: “It is a treasure trove of materials for Les fleurs du mal. I only fear that the so-called humanitarian charities may in the end sweep this special world from its corner of society.”
Kafu underestimated the robustness of Tokyo’s Low City tradition, and though the shadows cast across his beloved Sumida are more likely these days to come from office blocks and raised expressways than teahouses or the tenements of dissolute poets, the writer would recognize the essentials of present-day Asakusa. So too would Chokichi, the hero of his novel The Sumida River, who observes from the precincts of the great Sensoji temple “a moon... such as he would never see again.” Sensoji is in many ways the spiritual centre of the area, its courtyards best approached after passing under the Kaminarimon or Thunder Gate, a weathered wooden entrance flanked by leering, twin meteorological gods and a magnificent red paper lantern with the character for “thunder” emblazoned across it. Asakusa has always been geared as much to the needs of the hedonist as to the incense-impregnated world of the priest and Buddhist acolyte. Just behind Sensoji, practically overlooking the little-visited abbot’s garden, lies Asakusa’s sprawling entertainment district. Lurid posters outside cinemas remind visitors of Kafu’s novel observation in another work of fiction, A Strange Tale from East of the River, that “One can tell from the billboards what the general plots are, and what delights people so.”
Kafu is often spoken of as the champion of Asakusa and similar entertainment districts, but from the publication in 1909 of his collection of short stories called Bacchanals a more critical writer emerges, one who, as Okazaki Yoshie has observed in his book Japanese Literature in the Meiji Era, “begins to express vehement resistance against the vulgar society which oppresses and destroys the aesthetic world.” Despite the refined beauty and carefully crafted elegance intrinsic to the escapism many of Kafu’s characters relish, the venality of teahouse owners, hired servants and the younger breed of new entertainers is faithfully recorded in order to hint at a more contemporary vulgarity. Here is the spectacle of the floating world transforming itself into a common flesh market where profit margins, account books and debit lists are displayed just as they would be in any run-of-the-mill business.
Kafu’s Ginza, despite its veneer of a western shopping mall with its cafés, Italian restaurants and department buildings, is quite different from the one we know today. Kafu tells his contemporary readers (many would already have known as much), that most of the young women working in its European-style cafés, are prostitutes posing as waitresses. On the way to work in one of these cafés, pretentiously named the Don Juan, Kimie, the main character of his 1931 novella During the Rains, passes along an alley “just barely wide enough to let one person through.” The alley is lined with enormous garbage cans, and “Even in the dead of winter bluebottles buzzed about, and at high noon ancient rats the size of weasels went about their business at will. When someone approached, they would splash up water from the puddle with their long tails.”
Although Kafu spent frequent evenings in the company of Ginza waitresses, his writings express a preference for the more refined though increasingly embattled traditions of the nearby Shimbashi pleasure quarter. Here, all along the streets and alleys where geisha houses stood, fires burned in braziers outside entrances and lanterns were hung to greet the spirits of the dead during the O-bon, or All Souls Night festival, a sight that even in 1918, when Kafu’s Geisha in Rivalry was published, seemed more reminiscent of a former age: “Somehow in this new world of telephones and electric lights,” the narrator remarks, “the smoke of the welcome fires burning in front of the houses seemed out of place, and it gave things a pensive air.” The Shimbashi pleasure quarter, the setting for Geisha in Rivalry, was, as Harry Guest has written, like the Yoshiwara, a “shadow-world of prostitution, shown to be symbiotic with that of the theater, recalling the prints of Utamaro and other great depicters of the Floating World.”
Linking the disparate elements of the quarters Kafu favoured were the city’s rivers and canals. Tokyo’s waterways were already in a sorry state by the time he began writing about them. While paying tribute to them on the one hand, Kafu can be disarmingly realistic. The back canals of Tamanoi, the setting for much of A Strange Tale from East of the River, were no sweeter in Kafu’s day than now. Their waters, tainted by industrial filth, provided the writer with just the right ambiance in which to suspend, momentarily, the flow of time: “the foulness of the canal, and the humming of the mosquitoes - all of these stirred me deeply, and called up visions of a past now dead some thirty or forty years.” In the search for lost essence, O-Yuki, the prostitute in this tale of loss and fleeting retrieval, is “a skilful yet inarticulate artist with the power to summon the past.” Though fictive, O-Yuki is almost certainly based on women the writer met in the quarter.
Not everything that Kafu wrote about in the Sumida area has vanished. The old boathouses and white-walled storehouses have long gone, but several of the canals are still there. Yanagibashi (the Willow Bridge) remains; so too does one of Kafu’s old watering holes, the Kamiya Bar, on a street corner near the Azuma Bridge.
If Kafu’s writings are about loss, they are also about discovery. In The Sneer, a serial he wrote for the Asahi newspaper between 1909 and 1910, he has his main character walking through Shiba Park, an area that has since been cleared away to make room for, among other things, Tokyo Tower, and stumbling for the first time on the mortuary shrines of the shoguns. The character’s astonishment is genuine as he discovers that “in a corner of the vulgar, ugly, accursed city a place yet reserved for art, it was as if he had unearthed Pompeii.” This sensation of coming across a thing of improbabl
e beauty among the mediocrity of modern Tokyo is an experience as familiar in its own way to those who live in or explore the city now as it was to Kafu.
Kafu’s reflections on the vestiges of an older Tokyo never succeeded in preserving any of the areas he wrote about, nor did his beautifully lyrical and analytical musings on women ever win him an enduring relationship. He was married twice, each time a failure due, most of his biographers and commentators concur, to his promiscuity, although we might give him the benefit of the doubt as a writer and put his divorces and countless affairs down to his insatiable curiosity about the life of females rather than to compulsive lust.
Kafu’s opus is not a difficult one to read. His interest in the art and literature of the past and the social customs that had survived in many of the out-of-way corners of Tokyo never, to quote American scholar and translator Donald Keene, “penetrated very deeply because it was the surface, rather than the essence, that attracted him.” Kafu has often been criticized for paying too much attention to location and neglecting character. The long and detailed descriptions of geisha houses, gardens, the merits of a certain kimono pattern and the changing seasons we find in his work, easily construed as digressions by western readers, are as important as the characters who inhabit his novels and stories. To some extent, they are the main characters.
“I have from time to time,” the narrator of A Strange Tale from East of the River (Kafu’s alter ego in a confessional frame of mind) tells us, “fallen into the error of emphasizing background at the expense of characterization.” It is a literary shortcoming we can be very thankful for. Departing from Japan in the spring of 1955, Keene recorded that “On the plane I read Nagai Kafu’s Sumidagawa (The River Sumida). I found that I was weeping, not because of the story but because of the beauty of the Japanese language and the evocations of the country I was leaving.”
Tanizaki’s Naomi
Tanizaki Junichiro, arguably the finest Japanese novelist of his century, stood somewhat apart from the mainstream. Human desire and the primacy of the imagination were the focus for much of his work. Kafu and Tanizaki were equally preoccupied with women, but where Kafu’s male characters earn the favours of women through patronage and longing, Tanizaki’s gain their attention through humiliating episodes of erotic subjugation. The willing self-debasement of men in the cause of feminine beauty was one of Takizaki’s central themes, but so was the by-now painfully manifest conflict between East and West. For Tanizaki, sex often stood as a metaphor for culture. Infatuated in his youth by western modernity and materialism, as he approached middle age he began to reassess the merits of traditional Japan, to retreat into the recent past. The clash between East and West, the domestic and the imported, is the main theme of his novel Some Prefer Nettles. But even here a degree of ambivalence lingers, as the narrator of the story, recalling a childhood oppressed by the “crassness of the merchant class” and the inability to “escape the scent of the market-place”, observes:
He had grown up in the merchants’ section of Tokyo before the earthquake destroyed it, and the thought of it could fill him with the keenest nostalgia; but the very fact that he was a child of the merchants’ quarter made him especially sensitive to its inadequacies, to its vulgarity and its preoccupation with the material.
Embodying the cultural ambiguity of the “Modern Girl” (see below) was the heroine of Tanizaki’s novel A Fool’s Love. In this story, which both excited and disturbed readers, a young engineer, obsessed by the maturing body and sexuality of his child bride, is both gratified and bewildered. Naomi’s overpowering desire, encouraged by her husband who compares her to screen idols of the day such as Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson, is to look and act like a westerner. Bold and sexually subversive, her dabbling in cross-dressing and final entry into genteel ballroom society challenges existing class distinctions, gender and cultural practice. As Naomi’s polymorphous persona, promiscuity and appearance are modified to fit a western lifestyle, her husband instinctively reverts to Japanese tastes and traditions of family and marriage. In the final scenes of the power play between the couple, Naomi has acquired the affectations of male speech while her husband, now thoroughly acquiescent to whatever demands she might make of him, adopts an increasingly infantilized mode of speech, a telling effect rather lost in translation.
A character like Naomi would have been inconceivable in the less tolerant Meiji era of just a few years before. The break with the past and a short-lived but very real permissiveness infused every aspect of the city. The period even saw a limited form of parliamentary democracy, with the first government cabinets drawn from political parties. Radical politics mixed with artistic experimentation to a degree not seen before. Cubism, Expressionism, Dada and Constructivism were explored. This was the day of the so-called “I-novel”, realistic literary diaries painstakingly recording every detail and sensation of a character’s life and mood changes. The final years of Taisho witnessed a blossoming of movements for various causes. There were campaigns for the liberation of outcast groups like the burakumin, a universal suffrage movement and a women’s rights movement.
Greater pluralism translated into an increase in personal freedoms and a taste for frivolities and fads: dancing to jazz, staying up until all hours, drinking alcohol. The lyrics of one song, “Tokyo March”, may have been trite in their requisitioning of neologisms like jazu (jazz) and rikyuru (liquor), but they capture the flavour of the times, the willingness to dabble and experiment. This was not entirely new. Even the Meiji period, stern in many ways, was not without its frivolities. Lafcadio Hearn noted the appearance in 1898 of a new variety of cigarette that, fitted with a paper mouthpiece, would produce a chemical reaction when lit, resulting in a photo perfect image of a dancing girl.
Asakusa: The New Hedonism
If you wanted to meet a real dancing girl, Asakusa was the place to go. The quarter provided a playground for the most intense sampling of the sensual, visual and gastronomic pleasures of the city. Asakusa Park had expanded in the Meiji era to include gardens, two ornamental lakes with roped walkways and a miniature Mount Fuji, the ascent of which could be made for a small fee. In 1903 the city’s first cinema, the Electric Hall, opened. The theatres, street fairs, open-air sumo wrestling displays, women acrobats, archery galleries and cinemas that had sprung up just a block or two away from the Senso-ji temple had an immediate transforming effect on the area, drawing mass audiences to the district. While most people embraced the changes, some writers, like the playwright and novelist Kubota Mantaro, had their doubts. A native, he watched the effects wrought on his beloved Asakusa by the arrival of cinema with something like horror:
It swept away all else, and took control of the park. The life of the place, the colour, quite changed. The “new tide” was violent and relentless. In the districts along the western ditch, by the Koryuji Temple, somnolence had reigned. It quite departed. The old shops, dealers in tools and scrap and rags, the hair dresser’s and the bodkin and bangle places - they all went away, as did the water in the ditch. New shops put up their brazen signs: Western restaurants, beef and horse places, short-order places, milk parlours.
A shift towards brasher tastes and newer forms of entertainment could be seen everywhere one looked. Epitomizing the changes was the Hanayashiki (Flower Residence), a former aristocratic mansion to the west of the temple. The creation of landscape designer Morita Rokusaburo, the gardens were opened in 1853 in a part of the Asakusa Rokku district set aside for entertainment. Up to the first years of the Meiji period, the public enjoyed visiting the gardens at different seasons to admire flowering trees: late winter plum, spring cherries, camellias and autumn chrysanthemums. Haiku and tanka poets held parties there. By 1872 ersatz features began to appear in the garden: a small zoo with a real tiger and elephant, a merrygo-round and life-size dolls of the type that could be found during the Edo period in the requisitioned spaces near the city’s river bridges. This was the same year that the prohibition on women climbing Mou
nt Fuji was lifted. The garden provided a combination of amusement and religious pilgrimage for those who, for reasons of health or economic constraints, were not able to scale the real thing. The replica of the mountain erected in the park in 1887 was an instant success. Built of wood, covered with lime and painted an earthen colour, it rose to a height of a hundred feet. A woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshimori shows climbers following a spiral path to the summit, where telescopes were available to look at the real mountain. Funds from the ticket sales went towards restoration work on Senso-ji’s five-storey pagoda, burnt in another of the city’s fires.
Nakamise, the approach street to the Asakusa Kannon Temple
By the Taisho era, any traces of the original gardens had, like the people of refined taste who originally visited them, totally disappeared, replaced by an amusement park. Tanizaki mentions the park in his unfinished novel Mermaid, giving us another view of Asakusa as it was in 1918: “... the Hanayashikki Amusement Park, the Twelve-Storey Tower, shooting galleries, whores, Japanese restaurants, Chinese restaurants and Western restaurants - the Rairaiken (a Chinese eatery), won ton, chow mien, oysters over rice, horsemeat, snapping turtles, eels, and the Cafe Paulista.”
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 20