Beauty on the Urban Periphery: Nagai Kafu and the Anti-Atemporal Spirit of Modern Japan Late Meiji to Early Showa Periods

Beauty on the Urban Periphery: Nagai Kafu and the Anti-Atemporal Spirit of Modern Japan Late Meiji to Early Showa Periods
Nagai Kafu's literature is steeped in an anti-chronological attitude that consciously kept its distance from the core values of Japan as the country developed its institutions and norms as a modern nation. From the end of the Meiji period to the beginning of the Showa period, Japanese society moved in a direction that emphasized state-centeredness, efficiency, and conformity, and the free atmosphere of the Taisho period was gradually lost. Kafu fundamentally distrusted this trend, and rather than progress and reform, he turned his attention to the disappearing sense of the city and the beauty of the individual. During his stay in Europe and the U.S., he saw not the superiority of civilization, but the depth of culture naturally accumulated in daily life, and upon his return he saw Tokyo as an awkward city where tradition and modernity had been cut to pieces. Kafu depicted spaces rendered useless by the state, such as the Hanayagi district, private brothels, and the downtown a
rea, believing that it was in these places that true beauty remained. During the war years, he continued to write "Danzentei Nippori," a collection of stories that documented the collapse of the city and his own disgust with it, without resistance or pandering. Nagai Kafu's literature is a quiet and solitary testimony to the anti-war era that continued to harbor a sensibility that modern Japan had discarded.