Why is Arthur Machen like Nagai Kafu?

The work of Mark Samuels reminds me in some way of the work of Nagai Kafu, though I've never really defined this similarity beyond thinking that both are shibui, and that often there are characters, events and descriptions that are at once, somehow, pleasingly understated and pleasingly overstated.

The work of Arthur Machen also reminds me of that of Nagai Kafu, and this is interesting, because Arthur Machen is a significant influence in the work of Mark Samuels. Neither Machen nor Samuels, to my knowlege, have been influenced by Kafu.

So, how does Machen remind me of Kafu, and is this also what Kafu shares with Samuels?

Again, I haven't defined the similarity very closely. I was thinking about it recently, as I went for a walk in the rain, and it seemed to me that both Kafu and Machen are able to write about not very much and make it majestically substantial by a kind of marshalling of the powers of lyricism. Interestingly, I don't think this is the factor that Samuels and Machen have in common, since Samuels' prose is generally a little more terse in style.

Kafu's Tales of France (Furansu Monogatari) is a work that I've been dipping in and out of for years, and recently, inspired by an unexpected Kafu-related gift, I picked it up again, remembering how much richer the experience of reading Kafu has been than almost anything else I've read. I started reading the story 'The Snake-Charmer' ('Hebi Tsukai'). It's a long short story divided into four chapters. In the first of these the narrator simply describes what one sees if one follows the route of his habitual walk in the environs of Lyon. In the second, he describes an evening he went on just such a walk, got drunk at some little hamlet, and was told that some travelling players had arrived. In the third chapter, he actually approaches the festivities to take a look. He doesn't go past the gate, but watches the performances that are put on outside to attract customers. At one point, a woman suddenly leaps up on the wooden outside stage, removes her cloak, takes five or six snakes from a box, and allows them to wrap themselves around her. She stands like that for a while, then puts the snakes back, nudges a fellow traveller with her foot, gets a cigarette from him, and sits down for a smoke. In the fourth and final chapter, the narrator complains of summer's passing, and how, with autumn, his work in a bank in Lyon has become unbearable. One day, instead of going into the office, on the spur of the moment, he goes off on a walk. He comes across some caravans that might belong to the travelling company he saw. He thinks how much better it would be to lead the Gypsy life, and walks quietly between the caravans. Outside one of them, he happens to see a tired and poverty stricken-looking woman doing needlework. Two small and filthy children are playing nearby. One of them falls and cries, and she picks it up, kisses it, combs its hair and so on. He recognises the woman as the snake charmer. He peeks, unobserved, into the open door of their caravan. There seems to be no one inside. He surmises there is no father. He has a sad feeling. He corrects himself – a somehow "dingy and damp feeling", and decides to go home without looking further.

Talking with someone about this, I tried to explain how Kafu could hold my attention even by just describing the route of a walk for an entire chapter. The story, I said, was actually in the description itself. There was a message conveyed, like an actual event, in his description of the snake-charmer: "Her expressionless and thoroughly icy eyes seemed to contain no reflection even of the gathering crowd of the customers, and, as the smoke issued from her lips and drifted away in threads, those eyes gazed purposelessly out, far, far, into the evening sky."

This line, which ends the third chapter, somehow seems to carry in it the whole weight of the story. It is not an event, or a twist in the tale, or any such thing – only a look observed in someone's eyes.

Also recently (today), I have started reading Far Off Things by Arthur Machen. There is a great deal, even within a few pages, on which I could comment, for its significance to me as a reader. I identify quite closely, for instance, with what Machen says about his childhood growing up in the countryside of Gwent. At one point he mentions the view from Llanddewi Rectory:

Through a cleft one might see now and again a bright yellow glint of the Severn Sea, and the cliffs of Somerset beyond.

In my childhood, I was on the other side of that sea (though not in Somerset), gazing in the opposite direction.

I don't have time to linger over all such touches that have so far resonated with me (which include a reference to my favourite passage of De Quincey). Instead, I would like to quote that passage that convinces me I was right in linking Kafu and Machen in my mind. It is a passage in which Machen describes his scheme for a magnum opus he has long intended to write "some day":

This, then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth; and as I thought over this and meditated on the futility — or comparative futility — of the plot, however ingenious, which did not exist to express emotions of one kind or another, it struck me that it might be possible to reverse the process. Could one describe hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls so that a story should be suggested to the reader? Not, of course, a story in the ordinary sense of the term, but an interior tale of the soul and its emotions; could such a tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such is to be the plan of the "great" book which is not yet written.

Yes! Yes! Yes! But this is exactly what Kafu does, though perhaps to convey something less mystic than that which Machen is speaking of, and not, either, in a magnum opus, but, instead, repeatedly in short tales, novellas and so on. Kafu tells his tales through descriptions of the seasons, of seedy rented rooms, of decaying backstreets, of the faces of those who have lived in shadows.

I could talk a little here of flaneurism, psychogeography and so on, but I only really wanted to write a quick post to note this observation, this connection, that pleases me so much. Of course, I too, aspire to tell stories through this kind of description.