Nagai Kafu

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Nagai in 1927

Nagai Kafū ( Japanese 永 井 荷風 , actually: Nagai Sōkichi , Japanese 永 井 壮 吉 ; * December 3, 1879 in Tokyo , † April 30, 1959 in Ichikawa ) was a Japanese narrator, playwright, essayist and diary writer.

Life

Nagai was the son of a wealthy Tokyo merchant family. Coming from a samurai family, his father became a civil servant and businessman during the Edo period . Nagai had three brothers and a sister. From 1896 he studied classical Japanese literature and Chinese . In 1898 Nagai began writing short stories ; the first he published in 1900. In 1901 Nagai worked for a short time as a newspaper reporter and began to study French . Nagai was sent on a trip to America by his father in 1903 for business reasons . Nagai was not interested in his family's business, but looked for his own life experiences, which he used early on in critical writings. He traveled across the United States : Tacoma and Seattle , Washington, DC and St. Louis . In 1905 Nagai went to New York and began working there as an employee of a Japanese bank. In 1907 Nagai traveled to Paris , Lyon and London and then returned to Japan .

The main results of his years abroad are two volumes of short stories and sketches that were created under the influence of Maupassant and Musset . Nagai was a professor of literature at Keiō University and lived as a freelance writer since 1916. Only a few works by Nagai appeared between 1921 and 1937. Several of his works, which were not allowed to appear during the war, were only published after the defeat of Japan.

In 1952 Nagai was awarded the Order of Culture for his work .

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Nagai wrote short stories , short stories , essays , diaries . With his work he is considered to be one of the finely tuned, quiet, but not apolitical authors of the 20th century. Similar to Oscar Wilde , Nagai was an early observer and reporter of Japan abroad. He wanted to see exactly what Western influence was doing by studying its sources. Nagai soon got over the first culture shock after arriving in America . When he returned to Japan in 1908, he was a young author who had come to know himself and the essence of Japanese culture through sojourns abroad. The values ​​of his homeland were put to a severe test by Western influence .

Nagai's great literary theme is the changing city of modernity ; Longing for the Edo , the Tokyo of the past, the aversion to the western Tokyo of the present, the love for the half-outcasts, the geishas and their parasites who managed to keep a little of the Edo period . His work is indicative of the biography of the early years of the 20th century in Tokyo, especially his descriptions of geishas, prostitutes , dancers and other people on the margins of society.

The masterpiece of his last years, The Romance East of Sumidagawa (or: A Strange Story East of the River), appeared in 35 episodes in the daily Asahi Shimbun in 1937 , at the time of the Sino-Japanese War .

Nagai is one of the greatest diary writers of the 20th century. In Japan he follows the old, thousand-year-old tradition of the literary diary, which he led to a new high point. Nagai went on forays daily, always with a critical look at alleys that other writers tend to avoid. Born in Tokyo , Nagai, in many ways a flaneur in the sense of Baudelaire and Manet , is no longer actually at home in the Tokyo of his time; he has become a stranger who wanders his city more and more with the distant, reflective gaze of the stranger. Nagai continued his diary until his death in 1959. The edition of his collected works, edited by Iwanami Shoten in the 1990s, comprises 30 volumes.

Works (selection)

  • あ め り か 物語 , America Monogatari ("American Stories"), 1908
  • 腕 く ら べ , Ude Kurabe ("Rival Geishas"), 1916–1917
  • 濹 東 綺 譚 , Bokutō Kidan, 1937
  • 断腸 亭 日 乗 , Danchōtei Nichijō (Diaries), 1917–1959
  • Diary. The year 1937 , Iudicium, Munich 2003. ISBN 9783891291191
  • Beloved face (story), in: Marianne Bretschneider (Ed.), Moon on Water , Volk und Welt Verlag, Berlin 1972
  • Cemetery visits (narrative), in: Barbara Yoshida-Krafft (ed.), ... because it was spring , Iudicium, Munich 2002
  • Oscar Benl (ed.), A bell in Fukagawa , Horst Erdmann Verlag, Herrenalb 1964

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  • Ivan Morris (ed.), Nippon , Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 1965

Web links

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Nagai is the family name, Kafu the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Nagai Kafu
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nagai Sōkichi; Nagai Kau
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 3, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Tokyo
DATE OF DEATH April 30, 1959
Place of death Ichikawa