During the Rains & Flowers in the Shade: Two Novellas

by Kafū Nagai, Lane Dunlop (Translator)

Nagai Kafu was one of the most important Japanese writers of fiction during the first half of the twentieth century. He is best known for his evocative descriptions of the moods and fancies of its gardens and canals, its streets and alleys, its people, and above all its women - especially the kept women, geisha, and prostitutes.
During the Rains and Flowers in the Shade, which appear here in English for the first time, are set in the Tokyo of the 1930's. Most of the seedy neighborhoods that Kafu so lovingly describes have long since vanished, either in the bombing raids of 1945 or in the rebuilding that followed. Kafu's sympathies are clearly with the women that figure in these stories. A man wedded to the past, happy only in retrospect, Kafu saw in the world of the demimondaine the last tattered vestiges of the old Tokyo, when it was called Edo. He also saw in their day-to-day life the only honest way to live, the love with the least falsehood, in a materialistic, hypocritical society.
During the Rains (1931) is the story of the vicissitudes of an amiable and lascivious Ginza cafe girl. It is considered to be among Kafu's masterpieces by many writers, critics, and scholars, including Donald "One of Kafu's finest achievements....The exceptional praise that During the Rains won from discriminating critics was occasioned chiefly by the novelistic interest. The detached analysis of a group of people makes the story read like a work of French Naturalism, though a few passages...evoke the beauty of place and season in the typical Kafu manner."
Flowers in the Shade might almost be called a continuation of During the Rains. Its hero, kept by a wealthy woman in his student days, ends up in his forties being supported by a prostitute. Donald Keene says that Kafu "makes us see and all but smell the dingy rooms he describes, without ever allowing us to pass judgment on them or their inhabitants. Kafu neither approves or disapproves of his characters, and if he tells us in detail about their past it is not in order to demonstrate how environment and heredity have determined their lives...but to assuage our curiosity as to how Jukichi came to live off women, how a particular woman happened to become a prostitute or a procuress, and so on."
The present volume contains a Preface by the translator that briefly summarizes Kafu's life and career.

Genres: Japanese Literature, Japan, Fiction, Short Stories

Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Kafū Nagai (永井 荷風 Nagai Kafū, December 3, 1879 - April 30, 1959) is the pen name of Japanese author, playwright, essayist, and diarist Nagai Sōkichi (永井 壮吉). His works are noted for their depictions of life in early 20th-century Tokyo, especially among geisha, prostitutes, cabaret dancers, and other denizens of the city's lively entertainment districts.

(from Wikipedia)

Variation of names of the same author:

永井荷风

Kafū Nagai

永井 荷風

永井荷風

Reviews

[Praj · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has always been a shaky ground when ventured into an unknown territory of a new author. The subtle yet curious exploration marks its validity through either germinating skepticism or a blank slate of hope. The naturalism trail to Nagai’s Edo had been doubtful, the sui generis framework a bit vague, the dark alleys of Ginza blurred by the energetic one-yen cabs and the swarming trolley. The dutifully employed imagination had betrayed my senses. Heavily crushed underneath incessant yawns, there lay rousing alertness succumbed to lethargy. And, then I stumbled onto the following string of cornered words. “From downstairs, abruptly, a phonograph started playing. This was a sign that it was five-thirty. Those waitress who’d been resting since three now freshened their make-up and went on duty. Upstairs and downstairs, the lights came on........ there was a nightime liveliness.” There it was, in the midst of these myriad sentences, Ginza coming alive bustling through my sleepy senses, the empty glasses being clunked in crowded cafes, alcoholic mouths slurring in their dampness at the nimble sensuality of waitresses and geishas, habitual patrons flirting for a lustful night at the assignation house. The colourful lights of Ginza flickered, some dim and some bright, but in the end all of them sparkled like little fireflies bringing clarity to the Kafu Nagai’s imaginatively elegant world and essentially to my dreary stupor.


“There is illusion and there is actuality. When a thing exists, it naturally casts a shadow. According to time and circumstances however, the opposite sometimes happens and the thing is created by the shadow, matters will be peacefully settle of their own accord...”

The shadows of the floating world disseminating in the corporeal poignancy of Ginza cafes ,its fetching pieces carried by waitresses, geishas and unlicensed prostitutes in the clammy moonlit rooms of the assignation houses where lovers and patrons dwell in remnants of its past and covetousness of current sexuality. The illusionary mirage of heavenly lust, love, trust, hypocrisy ,obeisance and opulence of present time is eliminated to reveal the actuality of betrayal, exploitation, revenge, honesty ,shame, fear and the burdensome shadows of the past shackling the present and the looming pessimism of human life. Kafu’s literary world of women thriving on the margins of society is lonesome yet sincere. Kimie’s audacious sexual venturing into a threesome with an older patron; a radical event leading to concoction of a revenge plot by one of her lovers, depicts the exact sentiment that Kafu plans to put forth signifying the stark disparity in the code of loyalty between an adulterous man and a unlicensed prostitute. Kimie’s capricious demeanour cast an ugly shadow of immorality and indolent embedding the element of fear in Kimie alternating between the embarrassment and brazen scandalous liaisons. It becomes rather interesting to view the changing circumstances of a sloppy and eccentric waitress working in the pleasure district into a vulnerable woman fearing the shadows of the past and the recurrent realism.

During the Rain, fluently illustrates two impressively characteristic women, even though existing on either side of societal extremities, they are plagued by the impossibilities of their past and the pragmatic possibilities of their present. Tsuruko – the academically prudent common-law wife of Kiyooka, signifies the shifting cultural mores of Japan being solely looked as a land of samurais and geishas. Yet, the salacious presence of Kimie portrays the traditional emphasis on the pragmatic societal reality of the 1920s-30s Japan. Traces of patriarchal insolence are observed through the imminent demeanour of Kiyooka, who later on becomes an ironical victim of love and loyalty.


The remnants of Nagai’s beautiful Edo (former name of Tokyo) are delicately sewn through dramatic passages, reminiscing the vestiges of a fading city heritage with evolving times. The constant appearance of the Imperial Palace moat develops into a sturdy heritage figure that has a “touch of Edo” and the remembrance of the glorious past firmly rooted in the altering city. Nagai astutely signifies the magnitude of the past and its obstinate presence everlasting even through the constricted alleys of human ignorance. Similar to Nagai, who with his extensive travels abroad was rooted in the modernity of individualism while still restoring his beliefs in conventionality; the female characters in this manuscript depicted such societal malleability. It is a familiar misconstruction of geishas being prostitutes. There is however, a significant boundary between a cafe waitress and a geisha. Amusingly, Nagai bends the contrasting margin (which I suspect is due the impoverished economical conditions prevailing during the 1920-30s decade) by asserting the impressionable, “These days, what with geishas becoming waitresses and waitresses turning into geishas, there’s no difference anymore.”


Kafu Nagai’s acute interest in the exotic sensual world of geishas, cafe waitresses and prostitutes, streamed from the sincerity that he highly valued the ingenuous outlook of the ‘pleasure’ profession. The numerous unlicensed prostitutes ; daily entertaining their patrons as hostess further carrying their pleasurable acts in the nightly rented assignation house in a cutthroat profession , maybe erratic or even slight materialistic thriving at the bottom of the societal abyss, nevertheless they are least hypocritical and unlikely entities to join the phony masquerade of societal reverence and scathing prejudices. Although, I have a fault-finding opinion about the indolence of Jukichi, his words do ring with accurate notes easing O-Chiyo’s burgeoning quandary. “In Jukichi’s eyes, the lives of respectable people seemed absurdly constricted and somehow hypocritical. By, contrast, a lewd, indolent existence such as his seemed the happiness of life, without its pretense.” The willful thoughts of a perpetual male concubine resigning himself in the sediments of humiliation and monetary liability with a peculiar dynamism found in the emotional freedom of an aging prostitute’s affectionate simplicity and promiscuity.


“If there is just one time in one’s life where one has enjoyed oneself, it’s worth having been born. And when the time comes to give it up, you've got to resign yourself.”

Not only finding it tricky to let go of his own past but that of his beloved cultural metropolis metamorphosing to modernization of Taisho, Nagai’s both novellas – ‘During the Rains’ and ‘Flowers in Shades’ vividly captures emotional sketches and myriad shades of people either on the verge of leaving their agonising, forlorn past behind for an affable future or aching to abandon their arduous present to revive a particular worthy moment of their past to soften the harshness of their future. Through the vibrant strokes of the waning pleasurable districts and aesthetics of Ginza cafe culture and the glorious colours of Edo’s legacy and its visually captivating citizens, and when the woman in her ochre tinted make-up tossed a banana skin onto the sidewalk while shoving the oozing fruity pulp back into sticky mouth; I realized that my fondness for Nagai and his literary work grew a little more.

[Steve]

Nagai Kafu (1879-1959) has become one of my favorite authors during the past few months, but I must honestly signal that the two pieces translated in this book are not among my favorites.

Tsuyu no Atosaki (1931) (translated here as During the Rains but by Donald Keene as Before and After the Rains) was written during a sudden spurt of creativity after a lengthy fallow period. But the wonderful lyricism of Kafu's earlier prose had faded into relative colorlessness in the intervening time, as Kafu personally sank into a dyspeptic bitterness and alienation from most of his surroundings. After the Great Earthquake of 1923, whose attendant fires destroyed much of the city, the Ginza began to be re-built in Western fashion,(*) including many cafés, which were actually bars whose unpaid waitresses made their living through unlicensed prostitution. After Kafu dismissed his regular mistresses, he began to frequent these cafés to satisfy his sexual needs. This is the unpromising setting (unpromising at least for a writer with Kafu's particular gifts) of During the Rains, which focuses on one of these waitresses, Kimie, who, sloppy, amiable, manipulative and lascivious, reduces all of the other characters into mere shades.

In Kafu the Scribbler,

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Edward Seidensticker translated an extended passage of an essay by Tanizaki Junichiro about Kafu's During the Rain. Because of Tanizaki's own significance as a novelist and the interest of his remarks, I'll quote most of the passage.

The old-fashioned is fairly conspicuous in Kafu's recent During the Rains. Indeed in its style and the shifting of its scenes, it might be called the oldest of his novels yet. There are chance meetings scattered all through the book, which are used to further the plot, in a manner common enough in plays and novels of another era. The oldness of the form stands in subtle contrast to the modern colors of the material...

Such things as psychological description or the expression of emotions and states of consciousness, the attempt to penetrate deep inside a character, have come into fashion only recently. Our old writers of fiction were more concerned with plot. All sorts of characters were brought on stage and made to go through all sorts of scenes in all sorts of postures, but they were for the most part no more than stage properties to make the plot more interesting. The element of inevitability in characterization was ignored if need be...

I do not think these facts are to be explained entirely by immaturity of technique. We Orientals have a tendency to ignore humanity and treat people like natural objects, like so many sticks and stones...

Japanese writings have lacked the highly colored quality of Chinese. They show a sensitive feeling for nature, however, and one notes in them a certain warmth and gentleness; and yet in their depiction of human life, it is the exterior and not the interior that is emphasized... During the Rains is not, of course, a gigantic fantasy like such Chinese novels as The Dream of the Red Chamber... But the nihilistic coldness of the writer is strong as it has not been in earlier Japanese literature... Kafu's writing these last years seems to have dried up, to have lost its bloom... His prose, so rich and sensuous twenty years ago, has undergone a profound change, and has become so cold and unfriendly as to recall that of Masamune Hakucho. The fact that the styles of these two masters, who ought to be poles from each other, should thus have come together makes me feel keenly the passage of time.

Seidensticker finds During the Rains unsatisfactory as a novel; Donald Keene and many Japanese critics praise it. Granting that Seidensticker's criticisms (lack of rounded characterization, too much coincidence, secondary characters who do not contribute to the main flow) are valid, I must point out that these are criticisms made from the point of view of a modern and Western understanding of the novel. I, too, have internalized the conventions and assumptions from whose perspective those observations are telling criticisms, but I find them to be less compelling the more I read fiction written outside of that relatively narrow geographic and temporal enclosure. In other words, my answer to Seidensticker is "Yes, and so what?"

Keene sees this text and its companion to be a return to the Naturalism of the beginning of Kafu's career. Perhaps. He says it is "absorbing throughout, even though it lacks the beauty of Kafu's early work, and even though it reveals little of what twentieth-century writers had been striving to achieve in new forms of expression." Agreed in all three points. But I seem to weigh the absence of the beauty I have come to anticipate in Kafu's texts more heavily than does Keene. Other readers will weigh more heavily the text's utter disregard for modern prose modes. Nonetheless, Kimie's story, supplemented by those around her, is absorbing.

The novella Hikage no Hana (Flowers in the Shade) appeared in 1934, signaling its content with its title, for it echoes the word hikagemono - a person in the shade, an outcast. The characters of this story are all prostitutes, procuresses, gigolos and parasites living off of prostitutes. Their stories are told through multiple flashbacks and unlikely coincidences; the tone is dry and matter-of-fact. These are cold, harsh and sad stories. Surely, this is a kind of Naturalism revisited.

How I lament the absence of Kafu's earlier lyricism! Fortunately, Kafu's fiction soon took another direction and tone, closer to those of The River Sumida

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

and others. For the destruction of Meiji Tokyo in 1923 and the subsequent construction of an unrecognizable city led Kafu to develop a nostalgia for the same Meiji era city he once execrated. It is this mood of nostalgia which inspired Kafu to his best works. I have already reviewed one of these texts, written in 1937

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

and it is excellent. Now I have to find some of the others from this period, but I am coming to the end of the available translations...

(*) It is now the very embodiment of the steel, glass and garish neon I dislike so much about modern Tokyo.

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/835...

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kafu Nagai wrote from the early part of the century through the immediate post-World War II period (he resisted the government's call that writing support the war effort). These are two of his novels, both set in pre-war Tokyo's pleasure district; some of the women are even geishas. But this is no Floating World--Nagai's treatment is completely unsentimental. This is a business, and there is no room for romance, even of the gauzy kind that often appears in books about prostitution. (I am thinking here of Balzac, a man otherwise obsessed with business details, and the infatuations with which he populated "Cousin Bette"). This is a business, above all, perhaps the only opportunity available for a woman who for whatever reason steps away from the usual path of marriage and family. (Even waitresses seem to be generally available for post-work rendezvous). The one exception, tellingly, has a chance to emigrate and assist a Western scholar. Jail is a threat, both for the women and for clients obsessed with them. Marriages are fictions; lovers are transformed into business partners by economic need. The tenderest relationships are between a woman and her father-in-law and another and a former client, just released from jail for embezzling to support his life of pleasure. Nagai's sympathies are discreetly with the women; aside from the father-in-law and the embezzler, the men are generally egotists. If this is a business, it is one where the clients have all the rights, and the workers' outlook is bleak.

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is sexy and depressing, sort of like real life.

It made me want to hang out in Ginza, chain-smoking a pack of Seven Stars while watching the hostesses saunter past.

Reminds me of a couple of films by Mizoguchi and Naruse. Which is high praise in my book.

[Ross Scott-Buccleuch · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars for During the Rains.

[Don Flynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting tales of early 20th century Japan. Sometimes it's hard to believe that life back then could've been so salacious.

[Keso Gagoshidze · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd definitely recommended this to my teen kid if I had one

[Ad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tsuyu no atosaki ("During the Rains").
An evocative description of Tokyo, from the Ginza in the 1930s, when the backstreets were full of so-called "cafés," which were actually bars whose unpaid waitresses made their living through unlicensed prostitution. In those years, café girls had replaced the geisha. During the Rains focuses on one of these waitresses, Kimie, who, vigorous, sloppy, amiable, manipulative and lascivious, reduces all male characters into mere shades. Kimie works in the café "Don Juan" at the Ginza; she has a lover/sponsor, the 36-year-old Kiyooka, but also several other men with whom she regularly spends the night in seedy Japanese hotels, such as the car dealer Yata and the elderly "lecher" Matsuzaki, an ex-bureaucrat. Kiyooka is jealous and spies on Kimie, to know who her other "friends" are and is wondering whether he will keep her or not; he somehow wants to take revenge on her. Kiyooka's wife Tsuruko knows about his dallying with geisha and waitresses, and is thinking about leaving him. A beautiful chapter is when Tsuruko visits her father in law, a retired professor of Chinese, who now lives as a sort of recluse in Tokyo's western suburbs. Kimie spends the night with Kawashima, the previous patron of a geisha-friend, who has just been released from prison. The next morning she finds a thank-you note, saying that thanks to her, he has put off his suicide for one night. This novel marvelously brings the twenty-year-old waitress/prostitute Kimie to life, as well as the buzzing café life on the Ginza, which of course was wiped away by the war.

P.s. I still have to read the second novella included, Flowers in the Shade.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the small amount of Nagai's writing that has been translated into English, this book includes two novellas from the early 1930s. 'During The Rains' is lauded as the masterpiece, but I actually thought 'Flowers in the Shade' was the stronger work, and was often surprised by its lurid subject matter, given the time and place it was written. It's essentially the tale of a prostitute and her common-law husband who gets off on her dealings. Nagai doesn't judge his characters, he merely explains them, so his work never seems like exploitation. The language here was a bit drier than in the version of 'Something Strange Across the River' I read, and I'm wondering if that's simply due to a difference in translators, since they all were written around the same time.