Beauty on the Urban Periphery: Nagai Kafu and the Anti-Atemporal Spirit of Modern Japan

Beauty on the Urban Periphery: Nagai Kafu and the Anti-Atemporal Spirit of Modern Japan
Kafu Nagai is a writer who consciously kept his distance from the process of accelerating modernization and nationalization in Japan. His literature starts from the question of how to live against modernity, not how to live in it.

From the end of the Meiji period to the beginning of the Showa period, Japanese society was reorganized in a state-centered and efficiency-oriented direction. The modern state demanded that its citizens be modern in their institutions, morals, and lifestyles. The free atmosphere of the Taisho period was transformed into a pressure for control and synchronization in the Showa period. Kafu fundamentally did not trust this trend.

What he saw during his stay in Europe and the U.S. was not the progress of civilization, but the thickness of life in which culture was naturally deposited. When he returned to Tokyo, tradition and modernity had been cut to pieces, and individual beauty and pleasure had lost their place.

Kafu depicted spaces such as the Hanayanagi and private brothel districts and the downtown area, which were excluded from the national stage. As symbolized in his Kitan, he believed that beauty resided in what was considered useless.

During the war years, Nagai continued to write "Danzentei Nippori," which documented the collapse of the city and his own disgust with it, without pandering or resisting. Nagai Kafu's literature is a quiet record of the anti-war period, a record of a sensibility that modern Japan had discarded and held on to until the very end.