Tokyo Hermitage: Nagai Kafu's Solitary Gaze (1879-1959)

Tokyo Hermitage: Nagai Kafu's Solitary Gaze (1879-1959)

Nagai Kafu, real name Nagai Sokichi, was born in Tokyo in 1879. He was a literary figure who lived through the turbulent Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras, struggling between culture and civilization. His father was a high-ranking bureaucrat, and he grew up in a wealthy family. After graduating from Waseda University, he went to the U.S. to study at Columbia University in New York. He then went to France, where he was baptized in European culture. This experience imprinted on his inner self a sense of discomfort with rapid modernization and an attachment to the old Japanese culture.

After returning to Japan, while teaching French literature at Tokyo Imperial University, he wrote "Amerika Monogatari" and "Furansu Monogatari" based on his own experiences abroad, depicting the friction between different cultures and himself. The true Kafu, however, did not emerge until he entered the world of geisha and private prostitutes in downtown Tokyo. His eyes were focused on the lives of those who had been left outside the light of civilization. For him, literature was an act of recording what was being lost, a last stand against the destruction of emotions in the name of progress.

In "Bokuto Kitan," he depicts the beauty and passion that blooms in the mundane world through his interactions with private prostitutes in Mukojima. Kafu's brushwork, while maintaining the classical tone of the literary style, reveals the lives and emotions of the common people in the city with surprising delicacy. In Tokyo, where the reverberations of Edo still barely remained, he created a unique world that interweaves the chic with the ephemeral.

In his later years, he stayed in a house he named "Danjentei" and continued to write a literary diary called "Danjentei Nippori. War, air raids, postwar turmoil, and the transformation of Tokyo...... he wrote calmly and sometimes poignantly about everything. Geishas disappeared, amusement quarters were abandoned, the city was reduced to rubble, and people's minds were filled with the frivolity of the new era. Even under such circumstances, Kafu took solitude as his friend, and wrote as if he was seeing off something that was disappearing.

His literature was far from fashionable, and he never pandered to the times. However, his strict sense of beauty and his love for the city greatly influenced later writers such as Junichiro Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima. Geisha, yose, bathhouses, back alleys: behind these subjects lay a quiet lament for the emotions and humanity that modernization had truncated.

What Nagai Kafu depicted was the aesthetics of extinction and resistance to oblivion. Standing in the shadow of Tokyo, he continued to ask the question, "What have people left behind? What did people throw away and what did they gain? Even today, Kafu's literature continues to haunt the hearts of readers as the winds that carry the sorrows of a bygone era.