Did the single-author study ever go away? John Treat, in a recent assessment of the state of modern Japanese-literature studies, noted with approval the appearance in Japanese of “many fine critical biographies of canonical writers,” adding that such “‘single-author’ studies” are “unfairly disparaged” by some in the United States.Footnote ¹ Certainly, there was a sense at the start of the century that such studies had fallen out of favor so long after the “death of the author” and post-structuralist challenges to notions of a unitary self. At the same time, as a mentor told me then, “We all know that the author is a construct, but it's a useful one,” and scholars have continued to employ the format to productive, even brilliant, effect in studies of Shimazaki Tōson, Higuchi Ichiyō, Uchida Hyakken, Nakagami Kenji, and Narushima Ryūhoku, among others.Footnote ²

This approach, like any other, carries risks. Examining an oeuvre through the lens of the author's life story may tend to naturalize a career, fitting each work into a smooth progression toward what we believe he or she became and charting a seemingly inevitable ascension into the canon rather than identifying the social forces that propelled the author there. Because the critical biography typically plots contemporary social and political developments to the author's life, it may extend this naturalization to the history of that era. Then, there is the temptation to cite biography as validation of an interpretation. At the same time, the constructed nature of the “author function” does not make its effects any less real, and the author's life can provide a compelling framework for consideration of a body of work and exploration of an era, so long as it is informed by a critical method that makes for more than a triumphalist celebration of life and works.

Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) is precisely the sort of figure that attracts this treatment. Born in Meiji 12, he lived through momentous events, beginning his career around the time of the Russo-Japanese War and writing through total war, defeat, and occupation. He spent most of that career in the capital and made it his subject. He cultivated a distinct public persona—or, rather, several personae: world-traveler, roué, recluse. He populated his fiction with protagonists easily conflated with himself and kept a diary for scholars to pore over.

Edward Seidensticker introduced the author to readers of English in 1965 with his study and collection of translations, Kafū the Scribbler.Footnote ³ Later, Stephen Snyder's Fictions of Desire offered a distinct interpretation.Footnote ⁴ The fiftieth anniversary of Kafū’s death brought new attention to the author among Japanese scholars, and it has brought two books in English that offer new perspectives on Kafū. Gala Maria Follaco's A Sense of the City starts earlier, with Kafū’s first trip overseas, to Shanghai. Rachael Hutchinson's Nagai Kafū’s Occidentalism devotes more attention to the later stories set in Tokyo. Both deal with largely the same period—including Kafū’s sojourns in Tacoma, Seattle, Kalamazoo, and New York and then in Lyon and Paris, and the texts written and/or set there. Both bring to their subject a clear critical perspective—Hutchinson assiduously pursuing one line of argument throughout, Follaco building on that argument and branching in new directions. Together, these complementary studies greatly enrich our understanding of Kafū’s writings.

Hutchinson adopts her central concept from the work of Xiaomei Chen, who identified Occidentalism as a counter-discourse to Edward Said's Orientalism, whereby the discursive construction of Western Others facilitates self-reflexivity and the reappropriation of an Asian Self with the potential to serve as an “anti-official” critique. Hutchinson argues that Kafū’s Occidentalism finds its object of critique first in the modernizing Meiji state and then in wartime fascism. She discerns a process by which Kafū exploited binary oppositions in the relationship between “Orient” and “Occident” and, later, Edo and Tokyo (Hutchinson, p. 156). Hutchinson keenly defends Kafū as a “serious critic” of the Meiji state—locating him within a broader “search for the Japanese Self,” alongside Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, and Shimazaki Tōson—and argues that “it was Kafū who created the most persuasive argument for the definition and preservation of the Japanese self,” rejecting the image of Kafū as an apolitical writer of frivolous works who retreated from fascism into nostalgia (Hutchinson, pp. 3, 15, 2).

After sketching her framework with a brief acknowledgment of foundational theories of the Other, Hutchinson proceeds in chronological fashion across five chapters. The first two focus, respectively, on Kafū’s early collections, Amerika monogatari (1908) and Furansu monogatari (1909). The first chapter examines Kafū’s construction of the United States as a Western Other to the Japanese Self, and the second a variety of French and European Others and the question of how a national culture could navigate modernization while preserving authenticity. Hutchinson builds her argument in each chapter through readings of several stories that, though sometimes quickly sketched, build into a nuanced analysis.

The third chapter revisits those two early collections, focusing on their various constructions of the Orient and Kafū’s “flexible positioning” of himself—and of a Japanese Self. Hutchinson grapples with Kafū’s participation in Orientalist discourse in such stories as Shingapōru no sūjikan, where he describes Asian “natives” in dehumanizing colonialist terms, and Pōto setto, where he admiringly cites representative European Orientalists. She denies the applicability to Kafū’s writings of Said's definitional “dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a contribution” (quoted, Hutchinson, p. 120), insisting that Kafū’s work could have “no determining imprint on the Orientalist discourse in the West” due to the off-center relationship between Asia and the West (p. 120). This seems to ignore the effect Kafū had on that discourse in Japan, framing its reception and extending its influence as part of a global formation. She goes on to argue that, as someone “from within the ‘Orient’” appropriating the language of Western Orientalism, Kafū wrote his way out of Said's “closed” system (Hutchinson, pp. 128–29) and into positions from which to critique it.

The final two chapters bring us to the heart of Hutchinson's argument, Kafū’s strategic Occidentalism in the “returnee stories” and later works. She persuasively distinguishes Kafū’s Occidentalism from “self-” or “reverse Orientalism,” advancing her argument to those of Kafū’s works written after his return to Tokyo that explore Edo as Other and its potential as a site of critique of the Japanese state. Hutchinson argues that, in the stories collected in Shinkō yawa, “the essentialized space of Meiji modernity has progressively replaced that of the West as the primary defining contrast to Kafū’s idea of ‘genuine Japan’” (Hutchinson, p. 184) and that the author's “return to Japan” therefore represented not a reversal of his earlier fascination with the West but a continued critique of Japan's “inauthentic” modernity.

Hutchinson's analysis moves among three levels of the author-construct: the narrator of the stories, the narrator of the diaries, and the historical Kafū. She repeatedly infers the historical Kafū’s thoughts and intentions—as when she writes “Kafū aimed to awaken this audience to the beauty of Edo culture” (Hutchinson, p. 134) or “Kafū clearly did not feel himself to be part of the ‘Orient’ … as he felt nothing in common with the natives of these countries” (Hutchinson, pp. 126–27)—drawing frequently on the diaries, even as she acknowledges their constructed nature. Nevertheless, the result of this shifting, intertextual method is generally revealing, and Hutchinson thoroughly succeeds in presenting a fuller picture of Kafū’s work, establishing its relevance to contemporary debates over Japan's modernity, and proposing a useful framework for its analysis.

Follaco's study, published six years after Hutchinson's, demonstrates this success. Like Hutchinson, Follaco extensively references the vast body of Kafū scholarship, and she particularly acknowledges her debt to such scholars as Hutchinson and Evelyn Schultz, who have established “the pertinence of the author's literary discourse to his time” (Follaco, p. 132). Follaco repeatedly engages with Hutchinson's discussion of the Other, noting in her introduction that she will extend this idea to Kafū’s conception of “the city itself” (Follaco, p. 11). While both scholars explore the relationship between a temporal trajectory (Kafū’s career) and a spatial one (his locales), Follaco privileges the latter. She defines Kafū’s sense of the city as “a lyrical awareness,” informed by his travels, his reading, and “a natural aptitude for grasping the genius loci of urban spaces” (Follaco, pp. 1–2). She explains that “the spatial, as well as the temporal, dimension of [Kafū’s] writing pertains to the ‘sensed’ city rather than to the historical one; the notion of the city, in other words, is spatialized … but it is unterritorialized” (Follaco, p. 9). Follaco's careful attention to urban space ranks first among the many rewards of reading this book.

Follaco's study comprises eight short chapters evenly divided into two sections, “Abroad” and “Tokyo,” proceeding, like Hutchinson's, chronologically. The first section frames Kafū’s experiences in Shanghai, the United States, and France and the works written or set there as a series of “apprenticeships” in which he developed a literary practice that Follaco describes as “a concoction of past readings, careful observation, and poetic sensitivity to the environment” (Follaco, p. 119). The second section details Kafū’s application of this practice to Tokyo after his return to the capital, where, she argues, he attempted to write into coherence an urban space that had become unfamiliar by redefining borders, exploring marginalized groups and their “counterworlds,” deconstructing old landmarks and “invented traditions,” and cropping out those modern features that did not make sense to his memory. Follaco identifies in these strategies “an attempt to read the urban fabric and improve its legibility by re-writing it in forms that were more accessible to human sensibility” (Follaco, p. 158). She reiterates the rejection of Kafū as an author of nostalgia, arguing that his recognition of the relative nature of this sensed city is in fact quite modern. She also moves beyond binary oppositions, arguing that Kafū ultimately finds coherence in “tenacious” and “obstinate” nature—rivers, trees, weeds, weather—as expressed, for example, in the story Hiyori geta, where “his notion of the city … was not underpinned by a dialectic vision of past (Edo) and present (Tokyo); on the contrary, he valued their inherent continuity” (Follaco, pp. 208–9).

Follaco's pursuit of this argument leads her in fascinating directions. In chapter 1, as she describes the start of Kafū’s “apprenticeship” in the diary of his Shanghai trip and his debut short story, Enkoi, both published upon his return to Tokyo, Follaco identifies Japanese and Chinese literary influences, including the travel writing of Narushima Ryūhoku and the Chinese author Ge Yuanxu (Follaco, pp. 30–31), and describes how Kafū gradually moved beyond them. The third chapter, on Kafū’s time in New York, offers a discussion of Kafū’s interest in the theater there. The chapter on Lyon and Paris introduces the subject of landmarks, which informs the later analysis of Kafū’s photographs and his efforts to fix his sense of the ephemeral city. Chapter 8 provides a discussion of the shift in Kafū’s landscape description from panoramic to street-level. These varied subjects are representative of Follaco's intellectually expansive method.

Follaco's analysis is informed throughout by a sophisticated use of theory and consistent attention to questions of race and class. I particularly admire how she productively complicates Hutchinson's emphasis on national subjectivity with an insightful reading of class in Kafū’s work “as something that prevails over national belonging” (Follaco, p. 95). She also introduces Derrida's concept of différance to elaborate upon Hutchinson's discussion of the Other, noting that Kafū’s alter egos “are often perceived by the reader in negatives terms, for what they are not, and the result is an endlessly deferred definition of their group identity” (Follaco, p. 90). Together with Hutchinson, Follaco effectively maps Kafū’s absolute relevance to discussions of Japan's modernity.