3.71 avg rating — 52 ratings

"Nagai Kafu lived in America for four years at around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was among the earliest Japanese to do so. He was also an eccentric individualist with an extremely refined writing style. Added to all this is the fact that he takes an especial interest in the underbelly of society - prostitution, crime, the experience of immigrants and so on. With all this together, you have not only a great read - the material that Kafu made into stories from his time in America - but a unique sociological/historical document of the America of that era seen through the eyes of a Japanese visitor."