The ocean as a space of maturation in Nagai Kafū's critique of modernity

My contribution takes into account Nagai Kafū’s (1879-1959) “foreign” literary output, i.e. the two collections of stories he wrote during and immediately after his sojourn in the United States and France (1903-1908), focusing in particular on some short stories set on board of the vessels that took him from Japan to America, from America to France, and from France to Japan. Japanese literature at the turn of the 20th century consistently thematised the encounter with the “foreign Other” whose presence in the archipelago was felt as increasingly pervasive. The promotion of ryūgaku (studying abroad) enabled wealthy Japanese men to visit countries considered as models of technological and economic advancement to imitate and, possibly, surpass, while people of lower socioeconomic background migrated in search of better life conditions. In both cases, travelling to unknown lands meant confronting with otherness in its most basic yet problematic forms. It was on board of ships, suspended spaces and quintessential non-places, that Japanese from different regions, caste categories, and social classes met, interacted or just ignored each other. Part of the interest of Kafū’s stories of this period lies in their representation of both positions, and of the tensions and interactions between them. In Night Talk in a Cabin (1904), a young man full of doubts and expectations meets two Japanese men with utterly different stories; textual analysis of this work will show how the author stages an oblique representation of a set of possible futures for his own self, a mis-en-scène that can only take place on a ship, with the endlessness of the ocean symbolising the openness of the narrator’s destiny. The protagonist of A June Night’s Dream (1907) is sailing to France when he is reminded of the woman he has just left; besides this heart-wrenching love story, the main interest of the text lies in the figuration of the I-narrator as a cosmopolitan who, after four years in the United States, feels more American than Japanese, and scrutinises Japanese modernisation stressing its fallacies and incongruities: throughout his sojourn, Kafū had occupied an in-between position which is rendered effectively in this deployment of the ocean as the spatial setting for multiple meditations about life and society. Mediterranean Twilight (1908), Desert (1908), and Bad Feeling (1909), all included in the French collection, re-enact Kafū’s crossing to Japan and resume his critique of Meiji modernisation framing it into the geographical landmarks he comes across during his trip, with the ocean becoming the textual fabric itself. My contribution aims to demonstrate to what extent, in this author’s literature, the sea engenders stories and fosters reflections, serving as a veritable function of his critique of the modern condition and of the articulation of an atypical Bildungsroman narrative.