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Title	:	Amerika Monogatari
Author	:	Kafū Nagai
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 285 pages
Published	:	Expected publication: 65535 by Iwanami Shoten (first published June 1951)
Categories	:	Cultural. Japan. Asian Literature. Japanese Literature. Short Stories. Fiction. Travel

Amerika Monogatari Hardcover | Pages: 285 pages

Relation Supposing Books Amerika Monogatari

Nagai Kafu is one of the greatest modern Japanese writers, but until now his classic collection, American Stories, based on his sojourn from Japan to Washington State, Michigan, and New York City in the early years of the twentieth century, has never been available in English. Here, with a detailed and insightful introduction, is an elegant translation of Kafu's perceptive and lyrical account.

Like de Tocqueville a century before, Kafu casts a fresh, keen eye on vibrant and varied America -- world fairs, concert halls, and college campuses; saloons, the immigrant underclass, and red-light districts. Many of his vignettes involve encounters with fellow Japanese or Chinese immigrants, some of whom are poorly paid laborers facing daily discrimination. The stories paint a broad landscape of the challenges of American life for the poor, the foreign born, and the disaffected, peopled with crisp individual portraits that reveal the daily disappointments and occasional euphorias of modern life.

Translator Mitsuko Iriye's introduction provides important cultural and biographical background about Kafu's upbringing in rapidly modernizing Japan, as well as literary context for this collection. In the first story, "Night Talk in a Cabin," three young men sailing from Japan to Seattle each reveal how poor prospects, shattered confidence, or a broken heart has driven him to seek a better life abroad. In "Atop the Hill," the narrator meets a fellow Japanese expatriate at a small midwestern religious college, who slowly reveals his complex reasons for leaving behind his wife in Japan. Caught between the pleasures of America's cities and the stoicism of its small towns, he wonders if he can ever return home.

Kafu plays with the contradictions and complexities of early twentieth-century America, revealing the tawdry, poor, and mundane underside of New York's glamour in "Ladies of the Night" while celebrating the ingenuity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom of the American city in "Two Days in Chicago." At once sensitive and witty, elegant and gritty, these stories provide a nuanced outsider's view of the United States and a perfect entrance into modern Japanese literature.

Mention Books As Amerika Monogatari

Original Title:	American Stories
ISBN:	4003104269 (ISBN13: 9784003104262)

Rating Regarding Books Amerika Monogatari

Ratings: 3.66 From 35 Users | 5 Reviews

Judgment Regarding Books Amerika Monogatari

I read this a long time ago, first in translation, then in the original. The only problem with this edition is the translation lets the work down in places (don't believe the rather contemptible self-serving translator's introduction that says Kafu's prose wasn't so great at the time this was written - I have read the original, as I said). I voted for this in the 'Great_Underrated_and_Obscure_Books_Great Underrated and Obscure Books' Goodreads list, and there was a section where you can write

First, a bit of background cribbed from my review of Kafu's Sumidagawa , The River Sumida:http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...Nagai Kafu (1879-1959) was in the second generation of Meiji writers behind that of Natsume Soseki. Early in his career he was a member of the Japanese Naturalist movement/school, whose adherents actually adopted only certain relatively superficial characteristics of the French naturalists to their use. Though Kafu initially claimed Zola as his master, he very soon



Fascinating book. The author spent time in the US in the early 1900's. It was one of the first books written in the Meiji period that gave Japanese people a view of what America was really like. The darkness of America's social problems, like racism and prostitution, are placed in an eerily picturesque setting. It will probably offend you but it is meant to.

I've read one other book by Nagai, and found it very interesting to read his very Westernized perspective on America, and as a wealthy Japanese individual as well. From 1903 to 1905 he lived overseas, mostly in America. He had not been accepted in Japan's top level universities, and pretty much flunked out of a lower level one. What did wealthy Japanese men do when this happened to them in the early 20th C? Well, they went and lived in America for a number of years, often attending college

First, a bit of background cribbed from my review of Kafu's Sumidagawa , The River Sumida:http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...Nagai Kafu (1879-1959) was in the second generation of Meiji writers behind that of Natsume Soseki. Early in his career he was a member of the Japanese Naturalist movement/school, whose adherents actually adopted only certain relatively superficial characteristics of the French naturalists to their use. Though Kafu initially claimed Zola as his master, he very soon

Interesting to read a book about New York City through the eyes of a French poetry loving Japanese writer in the early 20th century. For me it was a bit dry - but he does cover the social life of Manhattan and elsewhere.