Nagai Kafu saved my life

I feel somewhat out of the groove of blogging at the moment, and I have an appointment this afternoon, so I expect that this post will not do its subject justice in any shape or form. However, I could not let today pass by without posting a couple of links. Fifty years ago to this day, Nagai Kafu, one of my favourite writers, died, at the age of 79. The Japan Times Online of Sunday the 26th features a rare article on the man, covering two Internet pages below:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20090426x1.html

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20090426x2.html

Mention of Kafu in the Western press is, indeed, very rare, and for that reason alone I am very grateful to the author of this article.

However, I wish – wish – that he had not relied so heavily upon Edward Seidensticker's opinion of Kafu:

Even his biographer and principal English translator, Edward Seidensticker (whose translations from "Kafu the Scribbler" are used here except where otherwise specified), had serious reservations about Kafu. Dubbing him (in his 2002 memoir "Tokyo Central") "the writer of whom I was probably fondest," he hastens to add that "affection and admiration are not the same thing."

Kafu is cursed with being introduced to an English-speaking audience by a translator who has employed a laughably Anglosphere-centric set of critical criteria in assessing Japanese literature. In almost every case, those aspects of Kafu's work that Seidensticker decries in Kafu the Scribbler are the elements I most admire.

There's not much left of Kafu today. Among the major Japanese writers of the early 20th century, he scarcely ranks as a survivor. Natsume Soseki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Junichiro Tanizaki are the towering names of the period. Kafu, relatively speaking, is a footnote.

So runs the article. If this is so, I can't help thinking this is at least partly because of the shadow that Seidensticker's judgement has cast over Kafu's work in the West (he's much better thought of in Japan, surprise, surprise!, but the author of this article doesn't seem to think that's worth mentioning, after all, that's only the opinion of people who speak and read Japanese as a first language). If anyone should be the "footnote" here, it should be Seidensticker. Seidensticker the Footnote has too large an opinion of himself, and gives himself billing over the writer for whom he should simply be a faithful translator. He states that some stories are not worth translating in whole, thereby not even allowing readers to judge for themselves. This, as far as I am concerned, is literary vandalism. It makes me fume. I will refrain from the kind of language I often allow myself on this blog, but I don't think I shall ever forgive Seidensticker for this attitude, grateful as I otherwise am for the fact that he introduced Kafu to the West in the first place.

I just wanted to let it be known that there are other views on the matter apart from Seidensticker's. I would have liked, for instance, the author of the above article to reference the much more clued-up (in my view) assessment that Stephen Snyder makes of Kafu's work.

Seidensticker entirely fails to look at the unreliable narrator in Kafu's work, his modernism, the depth of his irony, his treatment of text as artefact. In short, his views are pitifully conventional, shallow and outdated.

I think it was five years ago that I started my translation of Kafu's Okamezasa. I haven't been able to give it high priority, unfortunately, and I think I am only about halfway through the first draft. Thinking of how time flies, I really want to get back to it again. If ever I finish it, and it is published, I hope that it will help to bring Kafu out from under the shadow of his first English translator.

Nagai Kafu saved my life. There are few other authors, if any, about whom I can say that.