Kafu the Scribbler

"It’s not a full biography, but about two-thirds of the book is a biographical sketch by Seidensticker, who was a formidable translator and Japanese scholar. He was one of the translators of The Tale of Genji , and a very literary scholar – he had a wonderful style. Nagai Kafu is perhaps not the greatest Japanese writer who ever lived, but he is one of the more interesting ones and somebody for whom Seidensticker felt a great love – something I share. Kafu came from a well-educated family and was sent, in the late 19th century, to America – first to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to study and then to New York, where he spent most of his time hanging out in Chinatown, indulging his passion for prostitutes and opium dens. He then went to Paris, which he liked better than he did America. He came back to Japan very well versed in French literature and became a professor of French literature in Tokyo. But he quickly turned his back on the academic or even the respectable literary world in Tokyo and spent most of his life in the more raffish neighbourhoods of eastern Tokyo, where the red-light districts were. “It was the first time that Japan was occupied in its own history, and the world that was created at that time shaped post-war Japan.” He liked nothing better than to sit backstage at strip shows (and that kind of thing) and he described that world almost always in a nostalgic way. Because, of course, Tokyo was almost completely destroyed in 1923 by the earthquake and then again in 1945, and, in any case, when it wasn’t destroyed by bombs or earthquakes it was changing very fast through redevelopment. So it was always a city that was disappearing – or at least changing radically – and he was the great chronicler of what had faded and what was no longer. So memories of a Tokyo that was no longer there, or the little bits that were still there and reminded him of the old days, are very much his material. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He was a short story writer, really, a writer of novellas more than novels and a great diarist and an extraordinary, eccentric figure – one of the few, by the way, who during World War II was resolutely against the ultra-nationalism that many other Japanese writers at the time embraced. Yes, I like his writing style and I like the subjects – I share his interest in the demi-monde of Tokyo, and the old districts, and I think he was a very fine writer of short stories. Not so much of his work has been translated, but the most famous stories have been."